Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction

Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction

Author: Christopher Pittard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1317073088

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Concentrating on works by authors such as Fergus Hume, Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, Christopher Pittard explores the complex relation between the emergence of detective fictions in the 1880s and 1890s and the concept of purity. The centrality of material and moral purity as a theme of the genre, Pittard argues, both reflected and satirised a contemporary discourse of degeneration in which criminality was equated with dirt and disease and where national boundaries were guarded against the threat of the criminal foreigner. Situating his discussion within the ideologies underpinning George Newnes's Strand Magazine as well as a wide range of nonfiction texts, Pittard demonstrates that the genre was a response to the seductive and impure delights associated with sensation and gothic novels. Further, Pittard suggests that criticism of detective fiction has in turn become obsessed with the idea of purity, thus illustrating how a genre concerned with policing the impure itself became subject to the same fear of contamination. Contributing to the richness of Pittard's project are his discussions of the convergence of medical discourse and detective fiction in the 1890s, including the way social protest movements like the antivivisectionist campaigns and medical explorations of criminality raised questions related to moral purity.


Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction

Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction

Author: Dr Christopher Pittard

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2013-05-28

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1409478823

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Concentrating on works by authors such as Fergus Hume, Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen, L.T. Meade, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, Christopher Pittard explores the complex relation between the emergence of detective fictions in the 1880s and 1890s and the concept of purity. The centrality of material and moral purity as a theme of the genre, Pittard argues, both reflected and satirised a contemporary discourse of degeneration in which criminality was equated with dirt and disease and where national boundaries were guarded against the threat of the criminal foreigner. Situating his discussion within the ideologies underpinning George Newnes's Strand Magazine as well as a wide range of nonfiction texts, Pittard demonstrates that the genre was a response to the seductive and impure delights associated with sensation and gothic novels. Further, Pittard suggests that criticism of detective fiction has in turn become obsessed with the idea of purity, thus illustrating how a genre concerned with policing the impure itself became subject to the same fear of contamination. Contributing to the richness of Pittard's project are his discussions of the convergence of medical discourse and detective fiction in the 1890s, including the way social protest movements like the antivivisectionist campaigns and medical explorations of criminality raised questions related to moral purity.


The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes

The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes

Author: Janice M. Allan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-05-02

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1107155851

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Accessible exploration of Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to late-Victorian culture as well as his ongoing significance and popularity.


Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock

Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock

Author: C. Clarke

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-09-26

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0230390544

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This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.


The Return of Sherlock Holmes

The Return of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-02-07

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 019259866X

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Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, in the short story 'The Final Problem', but was tempted to bring him back to life ten years later, in the thirteen tales that comprise The Return of Sherlock Holmes. While the outcry that supposedly followed Holmes' death was mostly apocryphal (the claim that readers wore black armbands in mourning has been frequently cited but never actually proved), by 1893 there was a substantial readership for Holmes' two series of adventures published in the Strand Magazine and two earlier novels. Doyle returned to Holmes in 1901-2 with The Hound of the Baskervilles, a novel set before the events of 'The Final Problem'; the commercial success of the serialisation in the Strand led Doyle to consider reviving the Holmes stories on a longer-term basis. Accordingly, in 1903 Doyle was contracted by the American magazine Collier's Weekly to supply six more Holmes stories; the agreement was extended to six more, with a final extension for a thirteenth story ('The Second Stain') that Doyle (mistakenly) believed to be the closing episode of the Holmes adventures. These thirteen tales make up this volume.


The New Man of the House

The New Man of the House

Author: Brian Gibson

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-05-09

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1476686440

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The modern-day suburb began, and began booming, in 19th-century Britain. As suburbia spread, the New Woman arose and fin-de-siecle concerns grew, suburban men felt more besieged. Anxieties about hygiene, pollution, purity, the home, class, gender roles, patrilineal power and the state of the Empire rippled through British fiction. The new man of the house was trying, often desperately, to hold onto the old order, changing even more rapidly as the 20th century and modernist fiction arrived. This study traces suburban masculinities in popular genres--speculative fiction, comic fiction and detective fiction--and in literary works from the late-Victorian era to the start of the First World War.


The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction

Author: Liam Harte

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-10-15

Total Pages: 719

ISBN-13: 0191071056

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The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction presents authoritative essays by thirty-five leading scholars of Irish fiction. They provide in-depth assessments of the breadth and achievement of novelists and short story writers whose collective contribution to the evolution and modification of these unique art forms has been far out of proportion to Ireland's small size. The volume brings a variety of critical perspectives to bear on the development of modern Irish fiction, situating authors, texts, and genres in their social, intellectual, and literary historical contexts. The Handbook's coverage encompasses an expansive range of topics, including the recalcitrant atavisms of Irish Gothic fiction; nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction and its influence on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism; the diverse modes of irony, fabulism, and social realism that characterize the fiction of the Irish Literary Revival; the fearless aesthetic radicalism of James Joyce; the jolting narratological experiments of Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, and Máirtín Ó Cadhain; the fate of the realist and modernist traditions in the work of Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, Seán O'Faoláin, and Mary Lavin, and in that of their ambivalent heirs, Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, and John Banville; the subversive treatment of sexuality and gender in Northern Irish women's fiction written during and after the Troubles; the often neglected genres of Irish crime fiction, science fiction, and fiction for children; the many-hued novelistic responses to the experiences of famine, revolution, and emigration; and the variety and vibrancy of post-millennial fiction from both parts of Ireland. Readably written and employing a wealth of original research, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction illuminates a distinguished literary tradition that has altered the shape of world literature.


New Directions in Popular Fiction

New Directions in Popular Fiction

Author: Ken Gelder

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 473

ISBN-13: 1137523468

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This book brings together new contributions in Popular Fiction Studies, giving us a vivid sense of new directions in analysis and focus. It looks into the histories of popular genres such as the amatory novel, imperial romance, the western, Australian detective fiction, Whitechapel Gothic novels, the British spy thriller, Japanese mysteries, the 'new weird', fantasy, girl hero action novels and Quebecois science fiction. It also examines the production, reproduction and distribution of popular fiction as it carves out space for itself in transnational marketplaces and across different media entertainment systems; and it discusses the careers of popular authors and the various investments in popular fiction by readers and fans. This book will be indispensable for anyone with a serious interest in this prolific but highly distinctive literary field.


Historical Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes

Historical Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes

Author: Neil McCaw

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1538123169

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Historical Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes contains a variety of information about Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, as both narratives and also cultural phenomena. The volume will help readers look deeper into those stories and the meanings of the various reference points within them, as well as achieving a deeper understanding of the range of contexts of Holmes, Conan Doyle, and detective fiction as a genre. This book examines the broad global Sherlock Holmes phenomenon related to the ways in which the stories have been adapted into a range of other media, as well as the cultural status of Holmes all over the world. Historical Dictionary of Sherlock Holmes contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,000 cross-referenced entries that contain detailed examinations of the themes and features of the 60 stories that make up the Sherlock Holmes canon. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.