Sherlock Holmes: great detective, iconic literary creation… and Twitter phenomenon?
If Steele’s classic 1903 illustration of “The Empty House” had a Twitter caption…
(Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
Prompted by the sensation of the #IBelieveInSherlockHolmes hashtag, Jeanette Laredo investigates the Sherlockian world and the ways in which the cannon invites readers and viewers deeper inside its mysteries. How did a Victorian text create a perfect environment for fandoms both before and after the advent of digital media? More controversially, this cosmos changes the stakes of fan culture for academia:
Like Watson, we desire access to the potential fictional worlds contained in Sherlock’s early case files. The writings of The Baker Street Journal as fan fiction pull at the red tape that binds the untold cases of the great detective. As fan fiction they reify a connection to the fictional world by making the reader/fan an active participant in creating that world.
Read more at the Journal of Victorian Culture Online.