Holmes in the empire: postcolonial textual authority, transcultural adaptation, and crime fiction as world literature
Date
2019
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Scholarly and popular discussions of detective fiction, and crime fiction largely, tend to place Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories at the center of the genre. That centralized model of the genre, where Holmes stories are afforded genre-establishing power, is maintained despite resistance from the genre’s constituent texts and historical realities. This Anglocentric model positions the genre as a British product with all other traditions existing as solely responses to or localizations of a Western genre. This dissertation analyzes how genre texts challenge conventional notions of authorship, nationality, and literary value using this Anglocentric, Sherlock Holmes-focused model of the detective fiction genre as a case study. Ultimately, this project suggests alternative, non-hierarchical models of authorship, genre, and textual authority based on approaches in postcolonial criticism, world literature, and adaptation studies. ☐ The first chapter identifies a “crisis of originality” in the academic humanities: an awareness that conventional notions of authorship and national literary tradition are unsustainable, but a reluctance to abandon those concepts because of their historical value in organizing scholarly work. This crisis is made visible via the Holmesian case study—how the history of, and intertextual relationships within, detective fiction interact with the prevailing, Anglocentric narrative of the genre. The second chapter rereads histories of that genre, like those by Sayers, Haycraft, and Ascari, noting that historical complexities of the genre’s transnational development are replaced with narratives that privilege anglophone texts and a colonial model of original-and-response. The third and fourth chapters read colonial and postcolonial detective fiction in India and China—Satyajit Ray’s Feluda mysteries, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s Bakshi stories, and the crime fiction of Cheng Xiaoqing—to examine how they deploy intertextual relationships to Holmes to gain access to audiences and textual authority even as their finer textual details resist that Anglocentric narrative. The fifth and final chapter examines multimedia adaptations of Holmes and the postcolonial detectives, as well as their internet fandoms, to explore emerging models of the genre, and of authorship and textual authority, which displace the Anglocentric model and its conventional notions of authorship and national literary categories.