An editor in the offices of the Strand Magazine has received a challenge: Holmes' exploits as reported by Watson present only one side of the coin. There are persons working on the other side of the law whose intelligence and planning are equal to Holmes'. Moreover, the crimes they commit are "Such works of art" that authorities don't detect any crime has been committed. The author of the challenge encloses a short story showing how this perfect crime has been committed. Once that murder was verified by Holmes, the plotter announces a planned crime that will throw England into chaos--killing the Queen, the Prime Minister and Sherlock Holmes!
In Reports From The Dark Side, Sherlock Holmes is confronted by the most diabolical foe he has ever faced, and no one has any idea who he or she is or even that monstrous crimes have been committed. The mastermind of the undetected crime wave is the one who reveals the nature of the crimes, throwing a gauntlet before the startled Holmes. The revelations are not a confession, but the announcement of a planned crime that will rock the British Empire.
Una guida al celebre personaggio, illustrata con numerose fotografie e poster. Il libro comprende cast, trame e commenti di film, adattamenti teatrali, romanzi e fumetti, in un arco di oltre 130 anni. An a-z guide to the famous detective, illustrated with numerous photographs and posters. The book includes cast, storylines and film comments, theatrical adaptations, novels and comics, in over 100 years.
What is disinformation, and why does it matter? How can we understand and detect different kinds of disinformation? With an analysis of relevant events of the period 2012-2022, the book attempts to answer these questions. The book is organized into four parts. (1) The first part presents the notions of post-truth and fake news using some of the most recent critical studies, analyzing some typical examples and the environment in which some of them originated. (2) The second part introduces the notion of conspiracy theory and describes the emergence of the idea of white supremacy and its ramifications, together with the narratives developed during the COVID restrictions. (3) The third part describes the emergence of the algorithms behind social networks and their role in propaganda, making examples of US and European elections and the Brexit referendum. An analysis of 'Cambridge Analytica' shows the tip of an iceberg of disinformation that is spreading around the world. Some remarks by comedians and philosophers help to give a new view on the concept of freedom of speech, with particular attention to the more and more difficult freedom of the press. (4) The fourth part gives some “emergency tools” for detecting disinformation at an individual level, understanding the most hidden mechanisms of disinformation, and the biases that almost unavoidably enter our minds. These tools come from the results both of traditional theories and the most recent social philosophy of language, not despising references to statistics. This is a fundamental book for having a general survey of this period of political turmoil, consulting a wide list of references and official documents, and having a grasp of the means of intellectual self-defense. This book is non-standard: it relies on the most sophisticated theories of language and yet it gives everything in simple and colloquial language. Differently from sophisticated analyses of linguistic phenomena, it gives the feeling of participating in a tour around what happened in the last decade, with a disenchanted eye that uses some results of the critical literature, without compelling one to become a theoretician in the field of philosophy or critical analysis. The hidden focus of the book is freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and what they mean today in an era of more sophisticated and widespread disinformation permitted by the algorithms governing social networks...
This is a critical study of the great British man of letters G.K. Chesterton, devoted to the novels, stories and essays that explore the darker fringes of his wild imagination. "Everything is different in the dark," wrote Chesterton; "perhaps you don't know how terrible a truth that is." Chesterton's use of the theme of "gargoyles" provides the thematic structure of the book. It covers the detective stories of Father Brown and others, the locked rooms and miracle crimes in his writing, his status as a science fiction writer, and the riddles and paradoxes of three works--Job, The Man Who Was Thursday, and the play The Surprise. This volume also includes an interlude about Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges and a robust appendix including interviews about the formation of Ignatius Press's Collected Chesterton.
The critically-acclaimed BBC television series Sherlock (2010- ) re-envisions Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective for the digital age, joining participants in the active traditions of Sherlockians/Holmesians and fans from other communities, including science fiction, media, and anime. This collection explores the cultural intersections and fan traditions that converge in Sherlock and its fandoms. Essays focus on the industrial and cultural contexts of Sherlock's release, on the text of Sherlock as adaptation and transformative work, and on Sherlock's critical and popular reception. The volume's multiple perspectives examine Sherlock Holmes as an international transmedia figure with continued cultural impact, offering insight into not only the BBC series itself, but also into its literary source, and with it, the international resonance of the Victorian detective and his sidekick. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
The detective team of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dr. Joseph Bell star in this “ingenious” historical mystery (The New York Times Book Review). As many fans of Sherlock Holmes know, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle found inspiration for the great fictional detective in a brilliant Scottish surgeon named Joseph Bell. In an era when science was not often considered in the course of criminal investigations, Bell’s emphasis on observation and deduction made him a pioneer in forensics. In The Dark Water, Holmes’s creator joins forces with Dr. Bell to take on Victorian vagabonds, criminal masterminds, and all manner of mysteries. The pair relentlessly pursues the vicious killer Thomas Neill Cream—and visits a sleepy seaside town where a seventeenth-century legend known as the Dunwich witch has taken on new life. With “a gripping plot and psychologically sophisticated characters” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), The Dark Water is a thrilling, atmospheric adventure for historical mystery lovers, offering “an intellectual treat and a downright guilty pleasure” (The Washington Post).
A masterful combination of literary study and author biography, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick guides us through the parallel careers of two inseparable men: Sherlock Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Reconsidering Holmes in light of Doyle’s well-known belief in Victorian spiritualism, Brian McCuskey argues that the so-called scientific detective follows the same circular logic, along the same trail of questionable evidence, that led Doyle to the séance room. Holmes’s first case, A Study in Scarlet, was published in 1887, when natural scientists and religious apologists were hotly debating their differences in the London press. In this environment, Doyle became convinced that spiritualism, as a universal faith based on material evidence, resolved the conflict between science and religion. The character of Holmes, with his infallible logic, was Doyle’s good faith solution to the cultural conflicts of his day. Yet this solution has evolved into a new problem. Sherlock Holmes now authorizes the pseudoscience that corrupts our public sphere, defying logic, revising history, and promoting conspiracy theories. As this book demonstrates, wearing a deerstalker does not make you a mastermind—more likely, it marks you as a crackpot. Fascinating and highly readable, How Sherlock Pulled the Trick returns the iconic Holmes to his mystical origins.
Here in one convenient book by a noted Sherlockian scholar is everything needed for the study and enjoyment of the Holmes canon: information on the stories and their publishing history; an assessment of a century of illustrators; a biography of Arthur Conan Doyle and a bibliography of his other writings; commentary on the films and plays about Sherlock Holmes; synopses of the stories and information about their characters; a survey of Victorian life and on the geography and social scene of 1895 London; and information on current Sherlockian organizations. A final section comments on the lasting appeal of Sherlock Holmes and what he means to generations of readers.
Argues that the photographic negative gives a new way of understanding Victorian debates surrounding origins and copies as well as reality and representation. Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology that facilitates photographic reproduction by way of image inversion, and Susan E. Cook argues that this particular photographic technology influenced the British realist novel and literary celebrity culture, as authors grappled with the technology of inversion and reproduction in their lives and works. The book analyzes literary works by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. W. Hornung, Cyril Bennett, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker, and puts readings of those works into conversations with distinct photographic forms, including the daguerreotype, solarization, forensic photography, common cabinet cards, double exposures, and postmortem portraiture. In addition to literary texts, the book analyzes photographic discourses from letters and public writings of photographers and the nineteenth-century press, as well as discussions and debates surrounding Victorian celebrity authorship. The book’s focus on the negative both illuminates an oft-marginalized part of the history of photography and demonstrates the way in which this history is central to Victorian literary culture. “This is a fascinating and extremely specific discussion of the ways in which photography, more precisely negative technology, was ‘culturally embedded’ in the Victorian era. It is this precision that makes the book most compelling; as Cook herself notes, most literary scholars treat photography as a monolithic whole, but she offers a welcome specificity.” — Antonia Losano, author of The Victorian Painter in Victorian Literature
