Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes gripped the public imagination in the 1890s after Arthur Conan Doyle's stories were serialized in The Strand Magazine. The sleuth's appeal, however, extends well beyond the parameters of his fictional time. Sherlock Holmes is an iconic figure who has, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century, been immortalized in literary and film adaptations. Doyle himself increasingly appears as a fictional figure in contemporary novels and films that often confuse the boundaries between the historical and the fictional. This book explores and celebrates this continuing cultural phenomenon. Both Holmes and Doyle engage the dominant questions of their time as well as ours - of order and chaos, stability and instability, materialism and spirituality. As demonstrated by the re-imagining of Holmes by each successive generation, and the more recent fictionalisation of Doyle, these figures continue to simultaneously shape and disturb our culture and consciousness.