After Dorothy L. Sayers became famous for her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, she began investigating the mysteries of Anglo-Catholic Christianity, writing plays for both stage and radio. However, because her modernist contemporaries disdained both best-sellers and religious fiction, Sayers has been largely overlooked by the academy. Writing Performances is the first work to position Sayers' diverse writings within the critical climate of high modernism. Employing exuberant illustrations from Sayers' detective fiction to make theoretical issues accessible, the book employs insights from performance theory to argue that Sayers, though a popularizer, presciently anticipated the postmodern ironizing of Enlightenment rationality and scientific objectivity.

Nadella examines the strands of Luke's narrative, showing that the 'many voices' in the text should be celebrated as a unique feature of Luke's writing. Lukan scholars offer varying responses to the issue of divergent viewpoints in the gospel regarding the identity of Jesus, wealth, women, and the emphasis on doing vis-a-vis hearing. Many forms of criticism attempt to explain or harmonize these apparent contradictions. Conversely, Raj Nadella argues that there is no dominant viewpoint in Luke and that the divergence in viewpoints is a unique literary feature to be celebrated rather than a problem to be solved. Nadella interprets selected Lukan passages in light of Bakhtinian concepts such as dialogism, loophole, and exotopy to show that the disparate perspectives, and interplay between them, display Luke's superior literary skills rather than his inability to produce a coherent work. Luke emerges as a work akin to Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov that accommodates competing views on several issues and allows them to enter into an unfinalizable dialogue as equal partners. Formerly the Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement, this is a book series that explores the many aspects of New Testament study including historical perspectives, social-scientific and literary theory, and theological, cultural and contextual approaches. The Early Christianity in Context series, a part of JSNTS, examines the birth and development of early Christianity up to the end of the third century CE. The series places Christianity in its social, cultural, political and economic context. European Seminar on Christian Origins and Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus Supplement are also part of JSNTS .

Spanish Golden Age drama as an expression of morality falls between the extremes of art-for-art's-sake and utilitarianism. According to Spanish literary critics of the 16th and 17th centuries, drama imitated reality, the subject and domain of philosophy. The integration of drama and scholastic moral philosophy was an important aspect of the critical theory of this era, which held that art should both teach and delight. Through close textual analysis of representative plays, this book examines the artistic fusion of natural-law philosophy and drama. It demonstrates the relationship between ethics and the central ideological themes of these works, illustrating that an awareness of the doctrines of natural law ethics is crucial to an enriched comprehension of the drama of Golden Age Spain.