English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Biography & Autobiography - Literary Criticism, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 20th Century - Literary Criticism, Englis

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Name: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Author: Diana Barsham
ISBN: 9781859282649

by Diana Barsham

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Overview

A valued icon of British manhood, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has been the subject of numerous biographies since his death in 1930. All his biographers have drawn heavily on his own autobiography, Memories & Adventures, a collection of stories and anecdotes themed on the subject of masculinity and its representation. Diana Barsham discusses Doyle's career in the context of that nineteenth-century biographical tradition which Dr. Watson so successfully appropriated. It explores Doyle's determination to become a great name in the culture of his day and the strains on his identity arising from this project. A Scotsman with an alcoholic, Irish, fairy-painting father, Doyle offered himself and his writings as an model of British manhood during the greatest crisis of British history. Doyle was committed to finding solutions to some of the most difficult cultural problematics of late Victorian masculinity. As novelist, war correspondent; historian, legal campaigner, propagandist and religious leader, he used his fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes to refigure the spirit of British Imperialism. This original and thought-provoking study offers a revision of the Doyle myth. It presents his career as a series of dialoguic contestations with writers like Thomas Hardy and Winston Churchill to define the masculine presence in British culture. In his spiritualist campaign, Doyle took on the figure of St. Paul in an attempt to create a new religious culture for a Socialist age.

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Barsham (English, U. of Derby) presents masculinist readings of Doyle's autobiographical works, early fiction, novels, histories, war correspondence and propaganda, and Spiritualist and travel writing. In particular, she investigates the relationship between the Sherlock Holmes stories (read as secret autobiography) and Doyle's formal histories of the Boer War and World War I. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)