The British physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a prolific writer, best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who is perhaps the most famous fictional detective. Both were avid ...researchers and loved working in solitude. ...Conan Doyle investigated real crimes and Scotland Yard occasionally requested his advice on solving cases (panel 1). Like for Sherlock Holmes, such grueling work and lack of sleep took their toll on Conan Doyle's health, and he would have to go to quiet places like Seaford and Cromer at the British coast to rest and recover.
Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great Canon has become the most praised, most studied, and best-known chapter in the history of detective ...fiction. Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. In addition, however, almost since the first stories appeared, such was their uniqueness and extraordinary attraction that other authors began writing stories based on or derived from them. A new genre had appeared: pastiches; parodies; burlesques; and stories that attempted to copy or rival the great detective himself. As the field widened, there was hardly a year in the twentieth century in which new short stories or novels did not appear. Many hundreds are now known to have been published, some of them written by authors well-known for their work in other literary fields. The non-canonical Sherlock Holmes literature not only constitutes a literary field of considerable historical interest, but includes many stories that are both enjoyable and fascinating in their own right. Although a large bibliography on these stories exists, and a few limited anthologies have been published, no attempt has previously been made to collect them all and discuss them comprehensively. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes does so: it provides a new and valuable approach to the Sherlock Holmes literature, as well as making available many works that have for years remained forgotten. Presented as an entertaining narrative, of interest to both the aficionado and the scholar, it provides full bibliographic data on virtually all the known stories in the field.
Contents: Introduction; The vaults of Cox & Co: Watson's unchronicled cases and their pastiches; Baker Street revisited: period pastiches; However improbable: non-period pastiches; Friends, relations, and one enemy; The sincerest form of flattery: parodies and impostors; Complimentary (complementary?), my dear Holmes: copies and rivals; Bibliography; Indexes.
Despite the work of innovative historians such as the late Roy Porter to anchor the discipline more firmly from the perspective of patients and consumers of health care, medical history within the ...curriculum often seems iatrocentric, positivist, and lacking in a sense of identification with the complex and messy realities of medical practice. The conflict between prudent science and the allure of national and institutional prestige, media attention, commercial success, and popular acclaim, illustrated by the ultimate failure of Koch's tuberculin trials, still has relevance in the ongoing controversies over the influence of pharmaceutical companies over researchers and scientific journals. From a scientific perspective, the series also shows the challenge of scientific innovation through the widespread resistance to the concept of bacteria as agents of disease, from the dignified but traditionalist pathologist Rudolf Virchow to the doctrinaire nursing matrons.
The 2013 graphic novel Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black rewrites Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) as the story of two young Black men solving crimes in modern-day New York City. The ...adaptation challenges traditional Victorian national borders by highlighting the interimperial, white supremacist connections Doyle's works promote between Britain and the United States. Furthermore, it crosses Victorian temporal boundaries by evoking Doyle's racialized theorization of a mind-body hierarchy and the impact of this broader Victorian dogma on contemporary experiences of lived blackness. The formal complexity of comics facilitates Study in Black's restaging and rejection of blackness as abject materiality in the Sherlock Holmes stories and their original illustrations. This self-conscious and densely allusive redrawing of Doyle's novel presses upon readers the burden and insights of Black double consciousness, theorized at the ostensible end of the Victorian period.
Diagnosis murder Wise, Sarah
The Lancet,
12/2014, Letnik:
384, Številka:
9959
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Holmes and Dr Watson inhabit an optimistic world in which fingerprinting, craniometry, eye-colour charts, footprint analysis, telephones, telegrams, and speeded-up transport links are likely to make ...the mysterious mass of human beings huddling together in the city more easily knowable and traceable. Holmes's world was a man's world, and the Museum packs its display cases with items that telegraph to us the masculinity and homosociality of the fin de siècle: tweed, pipes, hats, walking canes, cigarette cases, and the scientific and pseudo-scientific implements of criminal identification and detection.
Arthur Conan Doyle's medical and writing careers intertwined and his work has a history of being read in the light of his medical expertise. He wrote at a time when the professionalisation and ...specialisation of medicine had resulted in an increasing distance between the profession and the public, yet general practitioners relied financially on maintaining good relationships with their patients and popular medical journalism proliferated. A variety of contrasting voices often disseminated narratives of medical science. These conflicting developments raised questions of authority and expertise in relation to the construction of medicine in the popular imagination: how is knowledge constructed? Who should disseminate it? How and by whom is authority conferred? How can the general population judge experts in medical science? These are questions explored more widely in Conan Doyle's writing as he examines the relationship between expertise and authority. In the early 1890s, Conan Doyle wrote for the popular, mass-market periodical
His contributions to it address these questions of authority and expertise for a lay audience. First establishing the medical context of doctor/patient relationships in which these questions arose, this article undertakes a close reading of these mostly rarely studied single-issue stories and articles as a means of ascertaining how Conan Doyle and his illustrators identified the relationship between competing narratives, expertise and authority. It argues that rather than maintaining a distance between public and professional, Conan Doyle's illustrated work demonstrates to his readers that there are ways to successfully navigate the appearance of authority and recognise expertise as they confront entangled representations of advances in medical science.
A number of years ago, renowned English biographer Andrew Lycett wrote a short piece about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that highlighted the seemingly irreconcilable tension between Doyle the creator of ...the “super-rational” detective Sherlock Holmes, and Doyle the passionate defender of “Christian Spiritualism”. In this essay, I aim to explore this alleged tension, ultimately arguing that these two Doyles need not be in tension—the only true tension being between the two terms in Doyle’s preferred philosophy, “Christian Spiritualism”.
On 24 September, 2011, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened the exhibition “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970–1990” that featured experiments in arts, architecture, and design of a ...period commonly referred to as postmodern. The date 1990 in the title obviously suggests an end to postmodernism, a view that claimed to possess endless vibrancy. Of course, many scholars have already discussed how postmodern culture has lost much of its currency. In literary circles, at least, new concerns and alternate characteristics have convinced academics and alike that we need new assessments on what characterizes the contemporary cultural theory. Alan Kirby, for example, explains how each period comprises a defined spirit and contends that a day comes when “postmodernism is over as an appropriate and useful category to define the contemporary” (5). Josh Toth and Neil Brooks argue tacitly for the emergence of a critical realism in the contemporary that, combining with other social stimulants, “herald the end of postmodernism as the reigning epistemological dominant” (2). And a few are as assertive as Linda Hutcheon who, in her epilogue to The Politics of Postmodernism, declares postmodernism a “twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past” (165), along with its canonized sources and anthologized texts. Along similar lines, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker respond to this critical juncture by offering an interpretive module that transcends the skepticism and disconnectedness normatively associated with the postmodern condition by embracing optimism and communication. Their discourse, more precisely, draws on both modernist and postmodernist maxims. Practically, their view promotes a “metamodern” spirit that oscillates “between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony” (1). It confirms fragmentation but does not despair of it. Instead, it tries to move beyond it. This attitude is further charged by a deep-rooted (neo)romantic sensibility that seeks infinity while acknowledging the impossibility of reaching such a state. BBC's Sherlock (2010–2017) illustrates such metamodern moments in both its storyline and aspects of cinematography. Many have written to underscore the postmodern coordinates of the series. Balaka Basu, in this regard, borrows from Fredric Jameson that all contemporary art is a form of pastiche and relates this to how the series annihilates temporality as each episode in the show draws, in one way or another, on the textual history of Sherlock Holmes. Basu also explains: “every part of the program's visual composition seems designed to shout ‘postmodern’” (200). She further emphasizes the imposition of texts on the screen in Sherlock as the “postmodern union of word and picture” (201). Likewise, Ann McClellan focuses on the significance of the intertexts in the fabric of the series and reads it as a “postmodern adaptation” that revels in networking (34). The show, argues McClellan, is “not only embedded within a broader textual network of adaptations, but it is also part of a wider web of technologically driven media” (34). In fact, remixed links, technologies, and references shape the foundation of Sherlock and contextualize it as a postmodern piece. Although Sherlock follows postmodernist patterns in both its style and philosophical aesthetics, it contains metamodernist moments that prioritize the construction of meaning and dialogue, despite all uncertainties. The restoration of a romantic gusto is critical to this negotiation, since moving beyond postmodernist principles of instability and subversion demands not only a modernist drive for order but a neoromantic energy that can remain adamantly optimistic notwithstanding the implications of distance or failure. To frame my metamodernist reading of Sherlock, I shall draw on the contribution made by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in this field. Their “Notes on Metamodernism” will shape this article's approach to the interplay between narrative and knowledge. Their theoretical account helps to explain the way Sherlock reflects the metamodernist oscillation between enthusiasm and apathy, and how this oscillation is compounded by a (neo)romantic worldview that seeks the infinite and the impossible.
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