The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Critical Reception of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2023
Genre:
ISBN: 164014093X

Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.

From Holmes to Sherlock

From Holmes to Sherlock
Author: Mattias Boström
Publisher: Grove Press
Total Pages: 684
Release: 2017-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0802189164

“If you love Sherlock Holmes, you’ll love this book…the best account of Baker Street mania ever written.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Winner of the Agatha Award for best nonfiction work Edgar Award finalist for best critical/biographical work Anthony Award finalist for best critical/nonfiction work Everyone knows Sherlock Holmes. But what made this fictional character, dreamed up by a small-town English doctor in the 1880s, into such a lasting success, despite the author’s own attempt to escape his invention? In From Holmes to Sherlock, Swedish author and Baker Street Irregular Mattias Boström recreates the full story behind the legend for the first time. From a young Arthur Conan Doyle sitting in a Scottish lecture hall taking notes on his medical professor’s powers of observation to the pair of modern-day fans who brainstormed the idea behind the TV sensation Sherlock, from the publishing world’s first literary agent to the Georgian princess who showed up at the Conan Doyle estate and altered a legacy, the narrative follows the men and women who have created and perpetuated the myth. It includes tales of unexpected fortune, accidental romance, and inheritances gone awry, and tells of the actors, writers, readers, and other players who have transformed Sherlock Holmes from the gentleman amateur of the Victorian era to the odd genius of today. From Holmes to Sherlock is a singular celebration of the most famous detective in the world—a must for newcomers and experts alike. “Riveting…[A] wonderfully entertaining history.”?TheWall Street Journal “Celebrates the versatility of one of fiction’s most beloved characters…terrific.”?TheChristian Science Monitor

On Conan Doyle

On Conan Doyle
Author: Michael Dirda
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2012
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691151350

Presents a critical analysis of the works of the British author, including his mysteries about Sherlock Holmes and his lesser-known short stories and novels.

Gothic Tales

Gothic Tales
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2016
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0198734298

This collection brings together 33 of Arthur Conan Doyle's best Gothic Tales for the first time.

Re-examining Arthur Conan Doyle

Re-examining Arthur Conan Doyle
Author: Nils Clausson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2021-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527574091

This collection re-examines the works and life of Arthur Conan Doyle from multiple disciplinary perspectives. It proposes new ways of studying Conan Doyle, and considers overlooked or neglected aspects of his oeuvre, offering fresh perspectives on the multiple genres of his fiction and his relationship to contemporary writers and movements.

Diagnosing Health

Diagnosing Health
Author: Summer Nicole Young
Publisher:
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2004
Genre: English literature
ISBN:

Scholars studying the nineteenth century have well documented the critical indictment of writers perceived as immoral, such as sensation author Wilkie Collins and decadent writer Oscar Wilde. These scholars often note that Victorian critics' tendency to describe the immorality of these writers and their works is couched in a terminology of health, where immorality is equated with physical and mental unhealthiness. Little attention, however, has been paid to critical reception of Victorian writers who are deemed especially moral or healthy. Victorian critics' depictions of Arthur Conan Doyle contained a shared vocabulary of words denoting the health of his person and lifestyle. Emphasis on the healthiness of Doyle's physical person largely reflects his status as an athlete of team sports and individual proponent of physical fitness. As Doyle developed the Sherlock Holmes short story series in the early 1890s, articles depicting him as wholesome and robust proliferated. Despite their treatment of subject matter similar to that of previously indicted sensation fiction, their appearance in a modified-serial format, and their main character's implication in decadence, critics celebrated the Sherlock Holmes stories as healthy subject material for readers. Paralleling the positive descriptions of Doyle as a person, critics' depiction of Doyle's writing also draws upon the Victorian concern with healthiness. Because of Doyle's public personas of doctor, athlete, and former soldier of the British empire, critics viewed him as uniquely capable of countering the immorality spread by such 'French' inventions as sensation fiction and decadence.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Art of Fiction

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Art of Fiction
Author: Nils Clausson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2019-01-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 152752664X

This groundbreaking book rescues Arthur Conan Doyle from the sub-literary category of popular fiction and from the myth of Sherlock Holmes. Instead of following new historicists and postcolonialists and asking what Conan Doyle’s fiction reveals about its author and what it tells us about Victorian attitudes to crime, class, Empire and gender, this provocative and convincingly argued literary study shifts the critical emphasis to the neglected art of the novels, tales and stories. It demonstrates through close reading that they can be read the same way as canonical literary fiction. Unapologetically polemical and written in an accessible, jargon-free style, this book will stimulate debate and provoke counterarguments, but most importantly it will send readers, both within and outside the academy, back to the fiction with heightened understanding and renewed pleasure. At a time when evaluation has virtually disappeared from literary studies, this iconoclastic book returns it to the centre.

Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard

Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard
Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2001-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780940322738

Having killed off Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began a new series of tales on a very different theme. Brigadier Gerard is an officer in Napoleon's army—ecklessly brave, engagingly openhearted, and unshakable, if not a little absurd, in his devotion to the enigmatic Emperor. The Brigadier's wonderful comic adventures, long established in the affections of Conan Doyle's admirers as second only to those of the incomparable Holmes, are sure to find new devotees among the ardent fans of such writers as Patrick O'Brian and George MacDonald Fraser.

The Historical Novels

The Historical Novels
Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1128
Release: 1986
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781850790426

Contains : M̀icah Clarke', T̀he refugees' and R̀odney Stone'.