The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes and Other Eccentric Readings

The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes and Other Eccentric Readings
Author: Michael Atkinson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2009-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472022350

The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes is about reading, a process that we take for granted. But Sherlock Holmes, the cultural icon to whose exploits Michael Atkinson gives new readings, became famous by taking nothing for granted. Holmes's adventures can be read in new ways, including ways that he himself would have found startling, but which can give contemporary readers satisfaction. In clear, accessible prose that will engage specialists and lay readers alike, Atkinson engages in "a series of flirtations" with nine of Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite detective fictions, using the tools of modern literary theory, from depth psychology to deconstruction. Bluebeard, the kundalini serpent, and Conan Doyle's mother pop up alongside Jung, Nietzsche, and Derrida as guides to new understandings of these classic stories. Just as Holmes uses treatises on tobacco ash and tattoos to give fresh readings to puzzling facts, Atkinson employs widely different critical strategies to unravel the mysteries of reading itself. "What a delightful book! This is surely the most interesting writing you will ever read about Sherlock Holmes, but it is much more. Michael Atkinson gives us literary criticism at its best: the sheer fun of watching a bold and imaginative reader breathe into well-loved, but well-worn, fictions new and enchanting life. Atkinson's mind races as nimbly as Holmes's own, and he makes the stories our hansom cab through human nature itself. A tour de force!" ---Norman N. Holland, author of Murder in a Dephi Seminar "A book that speaks directly to readers. . . Atkinson sees far beneath the surface of the Sherlock stories to provide fascinating commentary." ---Cincinnati Post "Atkinson demonstrates a love and knowledge of the Holmes stories. . . I would recommend The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes enthusiastically to any lover of the Canon who is prepared to have their perceptions widened." ---Mystery Writers of America Michael Atkinson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnati.

In the Company of Strangers

In the Company of Strangers
Author: Barry McCrea
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231527330

In the Company of Strangers shows how a reconception of family and kinship underlies the revolutionary experiments of the modernist novel. While stories of marriage and long-lost relatives were a mainstay of classic Victorian fiction, Barry McCrea suggests that rival countercurrents within these family plots set the stage for the formal innovations of Joyce and Proust. Tracing the challenges to the family plot mounted by figures such as Fagin, Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom, and Charles Swann, McCrea tells the story of how bonds generated by chance encounters between strangers come to take over the role of organizing narrative time and give shape to fictional worlds—a task and power that was once the preserve of the genealogical family. By investigating how the question of family is a hidden key to modernist structure and style, In the Company of Strangers explores the formal narrative potential of queerness and in doing so rewrites the history of the modern novel.

Sherlock Holmes Handbook

Sherlock Holmes Handbook
Author: Christopher Redmond
Publisher: Dundurn
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2009-09-28
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1770705929

Sherlock Holmes Handbook sums up a Canadian scholar's lifetime expertise about Sherlock Holmes -- the characters and themes, the publishers and readers, Victorian London and the Houdini connection, radio actors and cartoonists, the fans who cling to Holmes's reality and the professors who tease out motifs from the fifty-six short stories and four novels. The first edition of Sherlock Holmes Handbook appeared in 1993. This edition catches up on new films, new books (a few with a hint of the supernatural) and the advent of the Internet, which has spread Holmes's fame and Sherlockian fun even further worldwide. The intervening years have brought three multi-volume editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories, with hundreds of footnotes providing new insights and new amusement. They have also seen Holmes repeatedly on the amateur and professional stages, including a few Canadian productions. And there have been changes to everything from copyright rules to libraries, booksellers and audio recordings.

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.

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.

The Essential Mystery Lists

The Essential Mystery Lists
Author: Roger M Sobin
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press Inc
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2011-09-30
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1615952039

For the first time in one place, Roger M. Sobin has compiled a list of nominees and award winners of virtually every mystery award ever presented. He has also included many of the “best of” lists by more than fifty of the most important contributors to the genre.; Mr. Sobin spent more than two decades gathering the data and lists in this volume, much of that time he used to recheck the accuracy of the material he had collected. Several of the “best of” lists appear here for the first time in book form. Several others have been unavailable for a number of years.; Of special note, are Anthony Boucher’s “Best Picks for the Year.” Boucher, one of the major mystery reviewers of all time, reviewed for The San Francisco Chronicle, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The New York Times. From these resources Mr. Sobin created “Boucher’s Best” and “Important Lists to Consider,” lists that provide insight into important writing in the field from 1942 through Boucher’s death in 1968.? This is a great resource for all mystery readers and collectors.; ; Winner of the 2008 Macavity Awards for Best Mystery Nonfiction.

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1844678172

In some circles, a nod towards totalitarianism is enough to dismiss any critique of the status quo. Such is the insidiousness of the neo-liberal ideology, argues Slavoj Žižek. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? turns a specious rhetorical strategy on its head to identify a network of family resemblances between totalitarianism and modern liberal democracy. Žižek argues that totalitarianism is invariably defined in terms of four things: the Holocaust as the ultimate, diabolical evil; the Stalinist gulag as the alleged truth of the socialist revolutionary project; ethnic and religious fundamentalisms, which are to be fought through multiculturalist tolerance; and the deconstructionist idea that the ultimate root of totalitarianism is the ontological closure of thought. Žižek concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.

Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists

Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists
Author: Srdjan Smajić
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2010-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139485881

This book is a study of the narrative techniques that developed for two very popular forms of fiction in the nineteenth century - ghost stories and detective stories - and the surprising similarities between them in the context of contemporary theories of vision and sight. Srdjan Smajić argues that to understand how writers represented ghost-seers and detectives, the views of contemporary scientists, philosophers, and spiritualists with which these writers engage have to be taken into account: these views raise questions such as whether seeing really is believing, how much of what we 'see' is actually only inferred, and whether there may be other (intuitive or spiritual) ways of seeing that enable us to perceive objects and beings inaccessible to the bodily senses. This book will make a real contribution to the understanding of Victorian science in culture, and of the ways in which literature draws on all kinds of knowledge.

Accidental Wisdom

Accidental Wisdom
Author: Alla Renee Bozarth
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 405
Release: 2003-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595300227

Dancing the Labyrinth ...The only reason for going into the open heart or the labyrinth rose is to let your heart break open so that you can hear the first cry of creation when God birthed the universe, and you can become large enough to respond, let your whole life unfurl in all its magnificence and purity, and cry back to the Holy One with the beauty that will rise within you. --Alla Renée Bozarth

Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change

Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change
Author: Lauran R. Hartley
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2008-07-16
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780822342779

The first systematic and detailed overview of modern Tibetan literature.