The ideas and practices that bring a fictional character into reality.
In the second half of the twentieth century, American readers of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories—known as Sherlockians—worked together to create a world of Sherlock Holmes that crossed the boundary between reality and fiction. This book explores this Sherlockian world through an innovative lens informed both by geographical theories of spatiality as a process and literary scholarship readers' active roles in making stories happen. In doing so, the work helps to define the contours of a world in which the ontological boundary ordinarily assumed between the actual and the fictional bends, blurs, and breaks.
Drawing extensively on the University of Minnesota's Sherlock Holmes Collections, the world's largest archive of Sherlockiana, this book shines new light on Sherlockian activities in the mid-to late-twentieth century. It was during this relatively understudied but creatively rich period that the imaginative foundations of the fandom as we know it were laid, and readers created a rich, ever-expanding world of Sherlock Holmes through a variety of textual and embodied practices: writing, mapping, playing, and walking.
By:
David McLaughlin
Imprint: University of Wales Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 216mm,
Width: 138mm,
Spine: 15mm
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781837721658
ISBN 10: 1837721653
Series: Literary Geography: Theory and Practice
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 12 December 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: No Longer Our Product
List of illustrations Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: A nostalgic country of the mind? 2. Watson’s battered tin dispatch-box: Reading complexity and coexistence 3. Co-authoring the literary geographical world of Sherlock Holmes 4. Community of circulation: Blurring the boundaries between imagination and actuality 5. Plotting, unfolding, enchanting: Mapping Holmes’s literary-geographical world 6. Play, performance and sensation: Making places for Holmes 7. Walking Holmes into the world 8. Postscript Works cited
David McLaughlin is a lecturer in human geography at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Reviews for Making the literary-geographical world of Sherlock Holmes: The game is afoot
""This engaging study explores some of the key ideas currently animating literary-geographical work. Taking Arthur Conan Doyle's texts to be spatial events, McLaughlin carefully traces the collective, playful unfoldings of relations and meanings created by readers, leaving traces of the Sherlockian world scattered a long way from Baker Street.""-- ""James Kneale, Associate Professor in Geography, University College of London""
