243 research outputs found
Holmes and the History of Detective Fiction
No full textMerrick Burrow explores Holmes’s significance for the historical development of detective fiction, within which the figure of Doyle’s ‘Great Detective’ looms so large. Rather than viewing Holmes as a completely new kind of detective, Burrow shows how Doyle borrowed from the detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Émile Gaboriau, while reacting against others like Fergus Hume who did not reveal how their detectives solved cases. Burrow shows how Holmes came to overshadow his precursors, as well as peers such as Arthur Morrison, Grant Allen and L.T. Meade, as his pre-eminence and popularity among the readers of the Strand magazine became firmly cemented.In the early days, Doyle was primarily seeking commercial success and recognition for originality. Later, as he tired of writing the Holmes stories, Doyle struggled to breathe life into a format he felt he had already exhausted. Holmes’s longevity, Burrow argues, is due ultimately to the diversity of his influence throughout the varied developments of detective fiction in the inter-war period and beyond—from the whodunits of the English Golden Age and the American hardboiled thrillers of Hammet and Chandler to the influence of Doyle’s stories within the popular cultures of Continental Europe, China and Japan
The Cottingley Fairies:A Study in Deception
No full textJust over one hundred years ago Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the Cottingley fairies photographs in “The Strand Magazine”.But how did the literary genius behind the detective mastermind Sherlock Holmes get fooled by fake fairies?Now, you can discover the secrets behind the greatest hoax of the twentieth century in person or online!Visit the Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery to explore items from the University of Leeds Special Collections, which holds nearly all of the most important documents and artefacts relating to the Cottingley fairies. Curated by Dr Merrick Burrow
Oscar Wilde and the Plaistow Matricide: Competing Critiques of Influence in the Formation of Late-Victorian Masculinities
No full textThis paper examines the ways in which the concept of ‘pernicious influence’ was mobilized in late-Victorian periodical publications to reinforce a normative conception of masculinity through powerful discourses on the relationship between textual consumption and identity. Discussion of the threat posed by ‘penny dreadfuls’ drew not only on widely held assumptions regarding the criminalizing influence of popular fiction, exemplified by the case of Robert Coombes, but also made connections with the supposedly corrupting effeminacy of the ‘degenerate’ intellectual, with the trials of Oscar Wilde as the main focus. The paper goes on to explore Wilde’s engagement with the concept of influence across a wide range of his writings, in the course of which he developed an alternative critique of all influence as a perversion of self-realization. This relates in some respects to existing strands of critical debate relating to Wilde’s sexuality. However, the current essay seeks to frame Wilde’s contribution in terms of late-Victorian debates on the cultural significance of reading practices and in relation to Wilde’s own critique of influence, by means of which he contested many of the assumptions underpinning bourgeois conceptions of normative masculinity
‘The future of our delicate network of empire’: The Riddle of the Sands and the Birth of the British Spy Thriller
No full textWhen The Riddle of the Sands was published in 1903 it was quick to attract attention. Its plot, concerning a German conspiracy to invade Britain, has been credited by cultural historians with contributing significantly to a public ‘invasion mania’ in the years leading up to the First World War, which in turn fed the popular appetite for more spy thrillers, breathing life into the fledgling genre. Such assessments of the novel’s influence have tended to focus upon the authenticity of the invasion plot, the history of its subsequent reception and Childers’ presumed sympathy with the militarist opinions of Arthur H. Davies, one of the central protagonists. Connected to this is a common view of The Riddle of the Sands as belonging to a right-wing movement that sought to bolster British imperialism through calls for naval rearmament and the establishment of a secret service. The Riddle of the Sands certainly creates a space for the articulation of such arguments, which Davies does indeed deliver in declamatory fashion. But to identify the overall political sensibility of the novel with such demagoguery is only sustainable if one disregards the ways in which it is mediated by the literary form and tone of narration
The Petrography and Chemistry of Fossil Burrow Margins
No full textTitle: The Petrography and Chemistry of Fossil Burrow Margins, Author: Steven C. Harding, Location: ThodeA great deal of information may be attained from trace fossils. Burrow margins represent zones of complex interactions, which may be recognized in the rock record. Sediment deformation results during organism penetration and reoriented particles tend to align with the burrow structure. Sixty-five percent of all elongate grains show less than 10° tangential deviation parallel to burrow length, and 82% less than 20° tangential deviation for grains measured around the circular burrow cross-section. As suggested by fluid dynamic theory, fluctuation in burrowing velocity appears to induce grain rotation. Sediment type and fluidity,
in conjunction with the nature of burrowing, will control the preservation of reoriented grains. Burrow walls are sites of metal accumulation. Metal cations become complexed to metabolites associated with decomposition of marginal organics, or to clay minerals entering the burrow. Some of these metals may also "scavenge" additional cations out of irrigated seawater. Concentrations are preserved as oxides or metal-rich cements within the marginal zone; characteristic of only those structures which are organically induced. Electron probe scans across burrow structures produce high relative peaks for Fe, Al, Cu and Ni in the wall region. These analyses may allow valuable interpretations, expanding the realm of Ichnology.ThesisBachelor of Science (BSc
Healing Victorian Masculinities
No full textWhile the New Man figures as a "failed experiment" (22) in the novels discussed in this chapter, MacDonald finds nonetheless an implicit acknowledgement of the need for change in the social forms of gender, in romantic relationships between men and women, and in the novel as a genre equipped to engage with the changes already underway in the late-Victorian perio
Queer Clubs and Queer Trades: G.K. Chesterton, Homosociality and the City
No full text‘No one can have failed to notice,’ writes Chesterton in his ‘Defence of Detective Stories,’ ‘that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of elfland’. For the detective, he suggests, the metropolis is an enchanted landscape in which even ‘the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship’. And, Chesterton insists, it was above all in this low-status form of popular romance, the detective story, that such enchantment was to be found at the end of the nineteenth century because it ‘declines to regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace’. The fictional detective, for Chesterton, pursues a ‘queer trade’ and the aim of the present discussion is to unpick what that means. I am interested in why, for Chesterton, such a quintessentially modern, urban and, indeed, disenchanted genre as detective fiction becomes the privileged locus for such an ‘elvish’ vision. In seeking to answer this I pursue the hypothesis that the ‘queer trade’ of the detective serves to distance another, more troubling sense of queerness that Chesterton experienced while he was a student during the 1890s, and to which his writings return over and over—that bohemian subculture of the fin de siècle that he sometimes alluded to via the Wildean motif of the Green Carnation
The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain
No full textThis essay focuses on Haggard’s construction of an ideal of imperial masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Chrisman (2003) and Deane (2008) in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard’s masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies, and human relics
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