Interwar Women: The Psychogeographic Nature of Detection in Golden Age Detective Fiction

This thesis theorises female detection psychogeographically. Through an examination into the very mechanics of spatiality, the overall argument unearths an inherently psychogeographic nature of detection within specific figures of female detectives within Golden Age Detective Fiction. A psychogeographic perspective unearths the influential nature of space, and its impact on the construction of gendered and social identity. Moreover, specifically female detectives as psychogeographers voice the shifting social and cultural position of women during the period. Engaging with the cultural, social and political influences of the time, the thesis analyses the spatially imbued nature of space, and the ways in which it effects the spatial, temporal and cultural performance of femininity throughout the period of 1918 to 1954. Examining individual decades, the thesis analyses the transformations of imposed femininity, and the ways in which hegemonic gendered behaviour embedded in physical space, influence and impose the formation and enactment of identity. Within these reformed notions of the feminine, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers’s female detectives directly exploit and manipulate the process of spatial influence. This process of feminine manipulation of imposed identity is encapsulated through the process of subversive detection methods embedded in psychogeographic means of expression. Overall, the literature voices a shift in female psychogeography as well as voicing the transformation in a woman’s place in society and culture during the first half of the twentieth century through the metaphor of detection.

Citation

Martin, S. L. (2024). Interwar women: The psychogeographic nature of detection in golden age detective fiction [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Chester.

Publisher

University of Chester

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10034/629205

Type

Thesis or dissertation

Language

en