yet further bibliography!
Apr. 27th, 2010 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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queering_holmes-Barsham, Diana. Arthur Conan Doyle and the Meaning of Masculinity. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2000.
This ... is not entirely a recommendation. It's an interesting book; Barsham clearly has had contact with progressive ideas about gender and sexuality. It's mainly interesting for the glimpse it provides of just what exactly a non-queer reading of Sherlock Holmes looks like. Gender without the sexuality, if you will. Fascinatingly enough, she sees Holmes as some sort of Masculinity Fix-It Machine, repairing the excesses of masculine evil and feminized weakness in British society. Obviously, I disagree.
-Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. University of California Press, 1998.
This is ... also not quite a recommendation, though I think it's a much better book than Barsham's. But D.A. Miller articulates the theory that's come to really dominate non-Sherlockian criticism of the repressive relationship between detective fiction and social liberation or deviance. Very valid politically, but a bit depressing if you don't like your Holmes to be the Kyriarchal Avenger!
-Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Showalter comes from the earlier parts of the feminist literary criticism movement, and so this book bears some traces of the various issues with second-wave theory. Most of the text was printed as articles in the 80s, so don't let the publication date fool you: this is definitely not 90s crit. It's a bit gender-essentialist and a bit kink-shy, but the work Showalter does connecting the various sexual and gendered shakeups at the end of the century make her more than worthwhile. Lots of stuff on theater, Wilde, 19th-century feminist movements, and intersections between sex & gender. Nothing directly on Sherlock Holmes, but so much good context.
-Weeks, Jeffrey. Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes. Journal of Homosexuality 6.1 (1981): 113-134.
Older article, not directly regarding Holmes - but a fantastic rundown of the legal conditions of homosexuality, inversion, and prostitution in late Victorian England, esp. the Labouchere amendment.
-Wiltse, Ed. “'So Constant an Expectation': Sherlock Holmes and Seriality.” Narrative 6.2 (1998): 105-122.
This frood cites Henry Jenkins, proving himself to be a thoroughly excellent chap. The article draws some really cool connections between queerness, drug use, and serial fiction - Wiltse basically argues that serials refused to end properly, and so kept going in a sort of depraved addictiveness.
I also posted an anti-rec, with bonus bad quotes for Christopher Redmond's In Bed With Sherlock Holmes: Sexual Elements in Arthur Conan Doyle's Stories of The Great Detective a couple of days ago.
This ... is not entirely a recommendation. It's an interesting book; Barsham clearly has had contact with progressive ideas about gender and sexuality. It's mainly interesting for the glimpse it provides of just what exactly a non-queer reading of Sherlock Holmes looks like. Gender without the sexuality, if you will. Fascinatingly enough, she sees Holmes as some sort of Masculinity Fix-It Machine, repairing the excesses of masculine evil and feminized weakness in British society. Obviously, I disagree.
-Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. University of California Press, 1998.
This is ... also not quite a recommendation, though I think it's a much better book than Barsham's. But D.A. Miller articulates the theory that's come to really dominate non-Sherlockian criticism of the repressive relationship between detective fiction and social liberation or deviance. Very valid politically, but a bit depressing if you don't like your Holmes to be the Kyriarchal Avenger!
-Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
Showalter comes from the earlier parts of the feminist literary criticism movement, and so this book bears some traces of the various issues with second-wave theory. Most of the text was printed as articles in the 80s, so don't let the publication date fool you: this is definitely not 90s crit. It's a bit gender-essentialist and a bit kink-shy, but the work Showalter does connecting the various sexual and gendered shakeups at the end of the century make her more than worthwhile. Lots of stuff on theater, Wilde, 19th-century feminist movements, and intersections between sex & gender. Nothing directly on Sherlock Holmes, but so much good context.
-Weeks, Jeffrey. Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes. Journal of Homosexuality 6.1 (1981): 113-134.
Older article, not directly regarding Holmes - but a fantastic rundown of the legal conditions of homosexuality, inversion, and prostitution in late Victorian England, esp. the Labouchere amendment.
-Wiltse, Ed. “'So Constant an Expectation': Sherlock Holmes and Seriality.” Narrative 6.2 (1998): 105-122.
This frood cites Henry Jenkins, proving himself to be a thoroughly excellent chap. The article draws some really cool connections between queerness, drug use, and serial fiction - Wiltse basically argues that serials refused to end properly, and so kept going in a sort of depraved addictiveness.
I also posted an anti-rec, with bonus bad quotes for Christopher Redmond's In Bed With Sherlock Holmes: Sexual Elements in Arthur Conan Doyle's Stories of The Great Detective a couple of days ago.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 03:51 am (UTC)If we ever end up with some kind of unmanageable critical mass - not likely! - maybe then sort out some sort of official list. But for now more is better, no?
no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-28 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 07:25 pm (UTC)I was driving home from work today and thinking that a famous Sherlockian who really buys into this reading but should really know better is Michael Chabon--in The Final Solution a character actually looks at Holmes and explicitly thinks that she sees in him "all the vanished rectitude of the Empire" or something very close to that phrase.