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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.

The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.

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 explores claimants in a variety of fiction, especially the multiple claimants created by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and notes that a recurring feature is a recognition scene in a picture gallery. It argues that in Little Lord Fauntleroy Burnett is inverting the convention of the Yankee claimant, creating a conciliatory version of a form predicated on culture clash and the possibility of revolution. It suggests an analogue in Emily Dickinson’s ‘No matter—now—Sweet’, a possible influence in Captain Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest, and multiple heirs, including novels by Nancy Mitford, and The Hound of the Baskervilles.

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 on the crime fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Satyajit Ray and Cheng Xiaoqing examines the central role of adaptation in the international development of the crime fiction genre in order to present a more complex understanding of the genre’s international connections and mobility. The chapter questions the distinction between original and reproduction that has typically informed critical studies on the genre’s international spread through an analysis of the works of these three writers from Britain, India (Bengal) and China. In demonstrating the ways in which Ray and Cheng adapt what is typically considered an archetypically British genre to their local settings, the chapter deconstructs the preeminent position granted to Holmes as the originator and, instead, draws attention to how Doyle himself adapted the genre in a transnational dialogue with his literary forebears.

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 chapter discusses the portrayal of mummies and ancient Egypt in fantastic literature. While not necessarily the basis of a coherent subgenre, mummies were a recurring theme in the supernatural literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as authors of the fantastic found their imaginations fired by the latest developments in Egyptology. Stories from this period often differ significantly from the mummy films that would later develop in Hollywood, but certain aspects of them are nonetheless echoed by Universal Pictures' subgenre-defining 1932 film The Mummy. The chapter then describes haunted mummies and walking mummies. There are three writers in particular who stand out as the most likely influences upon Universal's The Mummy: Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.

This chapter argues that disability becomes fully specimen in the fin-de-siècle mystery, which grants authority to the professional discourses of medicine, science, and law. Comparing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’ (1893), the chapter illuminates the interplay between scientific discourse and narrative structure in fin-de-siècle mysteries, revealing the ambiguity with which late Victorians understood and criminalized disability. Despite Jekyll and Hyde’s modern Gothic, open narrative structure, the novella confirms the conservative disability stereotypes associated with late Victorian criminology and physiognomy, which placed anxieties of cultural deviance upon the disabled mind and body. In contrast, despite the conservative drive towards closure typical of detective fiction, ‘The Crooked Man’ undermines those stereotypes and the supposed criminality of the disabled body. However, when either narrative focalizes through characters with freakish bodies, that focalization troubles the professional authority of scientific discourse and denies the possibility of controlling deviance or separating it from imagined normalcy.

In its move to a streaming service and, with it, a less episodic structure, Discovery breaks new narrative ground for the Star Trek franchise – a wholesale move into the serial format. In a marked departure from The Next Generation (somewhat prefigured by the later years of Deep Space Nine), virtually no episode of Discovery functions independently of its fellows; watching the show out of order would not only be confusing, but actively ruinous to an assumed viewing experience built around slow accretions of narrative, long arcs of character development, and carefully placed disruptions of the status quo. The adoption of this format pairs intriguingly with the decision to release episodes weekly, which contrasts with the increasingly fashionable Netflix model of dropping an entire series at once. This decision also brings Star Trek’s storytelling into contact with some far older forms of science fiction, and this chapter seeks to understand Discovery’s serialisation by comparing it to that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.