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Arthur & George is a book about unlikely pairings and questionable divisions. It is a fiction about truth and relativity, perception and rationality, fear and authority. Drawing on the real-life investigation by Arthur Conan Doyle of a miscarriage of justice, it explores the borderlines of nationality and ethnicity, evidence and imagination, doubt and faith, fact and fiction, endings and beginnings. It underlines the power of narrative to weave a plot from scraps of unsubstantiated information, in which the key factors are conviction and prejudice. Part of the intrigue of the book is directed at the play on distinctions between fact and fabulation, and Barnes seems deeply sceptical throughout his fiction of the notion of an accurate version of events.

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.

This chapter explores the “prehistory” of retroactive continuity, and its implementation in narratives that pre-exist its conceptualization as a term. It begins by discussing the transmission of narratives amidst oral cultures before moving on to explore retconning in Biblical writing, particularly Midrash. The chapter concludes with a look at three master storytellers who used retcons as a crucial part of their “world-building” as writers–Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, and H.P. Lovecraft.

This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of historical time encouraged the emergence of a new breed of Gothic fiction which betrayed a distinct biological and anthropological cast. The chapter explains how the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker provided new locations for the unwelcome past to survive into and threaten the civilized present.

This chapter explores Oscar Slater's 1909 trial for the murder of Marion Gilchrist, an 83-year-old affluent spinster. The prosecution called for Slater's conviction based on the oral testimonies of Gilchrist's household staff and his neighbours. Slater's imprisonment in Peterhead Prison, however, did not last long. Through the help of the famed author Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote about challenging Slater's conviction, his case was brought before the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1927. The Court of Criminal Appeal overturned Slater's conviction and allowed his release. The Gilchrist murder case is an example of a serious miscarriage of justice and prompted the amendment of the Criminal Appeals (Scotland) Act of 1926.

In the late nineteenth century, we begin to see a new representational concern with the problem of animal signification – manifesting itself in a special focus on the animal track, trace, or marking as a form of legible signification. If we turn to fiction of this period, we can see a new interest in animal signification that can be understood in relation to Charles Darwin and Charles Sanders Peirce’s investigations into nonhuman semiotics. Considering a lecture by Thomas Huxley, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Priory School” and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and several Thomas Hardy novels, this chapter argues that Hardy can be understood as trying to create a novelistic form that might more satisfactorily transcribe nonhuman agency or sign-making – recognizing it as signification – while still respecting or acknowledging its difference. This chapter thus demonstrates the ways later-Victorian novelists struggled to find new ways to acknowledge animal agency, consciousness, and even signification within a literary form (the novel) that remained, at the core, anthropocentric.

The fifth chapter examines the debates surrounding women’s entry into the medical sphere as doctors, examining gendered debates around medical authority and professionalism. While New Woman nurses were figured as especially feminine, the New Woman doctor was – similarly to her typing and bicycling counterparts – posited as an ‘unsexed’ or ‘unwomanly’ creature. Noting the role of female doctors in the fight for women’s access to higher education and in the wider women’s movement, the chapter moves on to consider the role of literary texts in debates around female doctors. Reading Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student (1894) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Doctors of Hoyland’ (1894), the section describes the harassment faced by early female doctors.

This chapter argues that Afghanistan's status in the nineteenth century as imperialized but not colonized enabled the flourishing of fantasies that compensated for British subjects' anxieties about changes in their own state. The chapter defines “Victorian Afghanistan” as a complex cluster of images, ideas, and affects that crystallized across the nineteenth century. It examines William Gladstone's Midlothian Speeches (1879), Sir Walter Scott's “Culloden Papers” (1816), Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone's An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1816), G. A. Henty's For Name and Fame, or Through Afghan Passes (1886), and Arthur Conan Doyle's detective novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). In these texts, Afghans appear savage, primitive, and undisciplined, the antithesis of liberal selfhood. However, they also appear individualistic, freedom loving, and hospitable—qualities belonging to British ideals of liberal selfhood and civility. This ambivalent treatment indicates how racial stereotypes rationalized imperial practices. The British were not motivated to colonize Afghanistan, yet they wished to control its foreign policy. The imperative to cast Afghans as civilizable is thus absent. Instead, the texts romanticize Afghans, casting them, like the Scots Highlanders, as stand-ins for England's own pre-liberal individual selves.

This chapter examines Okamoto Kidō's detective fiction. Kidō was a Kabuki playwright who saw the detective story as essentially Western and modern but put it to ends that were thoroughly nativistic and protradition. Directly inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle, Kidō wrote, beginning in the 1910s, a hugely popular series of sixty-eight detective stories set in the old city of Edo (as Tokyo was known before the Meiji period). Kidō's stories are now collectively called Hanshichi torimono-chō (Hanshichi's Arrest Records). This chapter first provides an overview of Kidō's career before discussing his Hanshichi stories. It suggests that Kidō's works are suffused with ambivalent signs of anti-Westernism combined with a nativistic longing for a Japan that has been all but erased by the incursions of modernity.

This chapter surveys applications of game theory in literature, and is organized as follows. Section 1.2 sets out the three questions posed to several game theorists who at some time applied game theory to literature. Section 1.3 shows how Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe side-stepped rather than confronted the consequences of the so-called minimax theorem in their fiction. It then presents an application that illustrates how William Faulkner captured the spirit of the theorem, even invoking a fictitious “Player” to make seemingly random choices, which, according to the minimax theorem, are optimal under certain conditions. Section 1.4 considers problems of coalition formation in zero-sum games. Sections 1.5 and 1.6 review several works of fiction that may be interpreted as nonzero-sum games. Section 1.7 looks at game-theoretic analyses of the devil in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust and of God in the Hebrew Bible. Section 1.8 discusses Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval narrative poem that has been explicitly modeled as a game of incomplete information, while Section 1.9 concludes.

This sixth chapter concludes the monograph by examining the figure of the New Woman detective and the specific technologies of detection employed. While women could not enter the British police force until well into the twentieth century, female detectives had been a part of British crime and detective fiction since the 1860s, culminating in the 1890s with the rise of New Woman detective. Mapping the literary trope of the New Woman detective, and the part played by modern technologies in these narratives, the chapter considers the nature of forensic evidence and the gendered use of technologies in producing this knowledge. Reading M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Dora Myrl, the Lady Detective (1900), the chapter considers New Woman detective fiction as a culmination of the New Woman’s use of technologies at the fin de siècle.

Walt Disney not only demonstrated how color, widescreen, and special effects could serve to vitalize Verne for the screen but also proved that adaptations needed to retain the grounding in the author’s nineteenth-century world. In making the first large-scale screen rendition of Around the World in Eighty Days, producer Michael Todd consolidated and perpetuated Disney’s precedents, along with such promotions as book tie-ins and television specials. Todd had been interested in adapting the novel for the stage but now saw it was ideal for his involvement in the widescreen process Todd-AO, which sought to photograph on a wider film stock, 65 mm. A third Verne cinematic triumph occurred with a fantasy, the first feature film of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which in turn advanced the novel to the third most widely read Verne book. The frequency of other subsequent film, television, radio, stage adaptations, and publications have become mutually reinforcing, each fueling the demand for the others. Verne became fashionable once more for literary-minded adults as a movement slowly began to replace the faulty nineteenth-century renditions through improved translations.

Christianity is a story of origins and Darwinism, in major respects its offspring, is likewise a story of origins. A process as slow and undirected as natural selection demands vast eons of time, something addressed by the novelists, especially Thomas Hardy in The Return of the Native and H. G. Wells in the Time Machine. Christianity points to a God-driven miraculous creation where all is intended and designed whereas Darwinism points to a natural creation where chance rules supreme and nothing is guaranteed permanent existence. Extinct beasts, especially dinosaurs, were prominent in verse (Lewis Carroll) and fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle), and several, including Mathilde Blind and Augustus Charles Swinburne, explored the very idea of natural origins in verse. Relatedly, novelists, notably Hardy in A Pair of Blue Eyes, made the actual course of life’s history a prominent theme in their work.