Overview

From the early stories, to the great popular triumphs of the Sherlock Holmes tales and the Professor Challenger adventures, the ambitious historical fiction, the campaigns against injustice, and the Spiritualist writings of his later years, Conan Doyle produced a wealth of narratives. He had a worldwide reputation and was one of the most popular authors of the age. A critical study of the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle and a cultural biography, this is a book for students of literary and cultural history, and Conan Doyle enthusiasts. It is a full account of all of his writing, and an investigation of the role of the author as he practised it, as witness, critic, and interpreter of his times.His work was widely read and enjoyed, but it is far from being a simple endorsement of the masculine, imperialist, bourgeois, scientific world he so often portrayed.The subject of this study is what Conan Doyle knew--the knowledge of his own culture, its institutions and values and ways of life, its beliefs and anxieties, which is created and shared by his writing. The book is organized according to a number of cultural domains--sport, medicine, science, law and order, army and empire, and the spiritual life. At a time when literature had become a profession, in a society where literacy was more widespread than ever before or since, Conan Doyle emerges as a maker of culture, offering his readers an image of themselves, their past and their future.

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9780198728078

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Reviews

Kerr uncovers doubleness, but also dialogue and dialectic. There are stark contradictions within Conan Doyles life and work, as there are glaring inconsistencies within the British culture that he presumed to speak for, and to. But Kerr also shows the ways in which these seemingly polarised influences and impulses mutually inform, complement, and correct each other. Michael D. Hurley, Cambridge Quarterly It is one of the great achievements of Douglas Kerrs fine book that it reconciles the contradiction between Conan Doyles commitment to scientific thinking and his credulity over the Cottingley case. And this paradox is only one of many that Kerr exposes and addresses. Conan Doyle: Writing,Profession and Practice is thoroughly researched but wears its learning lightly; it is satisfyingly substantial but winningly elegant at the level of the sentence: it is a joy and an education to read. Michael D. Hurley, The Cambridge Quarterly

Kerr uncovers doubleness, but also dialogue and dialectic. There are stark contradictions within Conan Doyles life and work, as there are glaring inconsistencies within the British culture that he presumed to speak for, and to. But Kerr also shows the ways in which these seemingly polarised influences and impulses mutually inform, complement, and correct each other. Michael D. Hurley, Cambridge Quarterly It is one of the great achievements of Douglas Kerr's fine book that it reconciles the contradiction between Conan Doyles commitment to scientific thinking and his credulity over the Cottingley case. And this paradox is only one of many that Kerr exposes and addresses. Conan Doyle: Writing,Profession and Practice is thoroughly researched but wears its learning lightly; it is satisfyingly substantial but winningly elegant at the level of the sentence: it is a joy and an education to read. Michael D. Hurley, The Cambridge Quarterly finely nuanced ... a complex study of a writer whose legacy remains striking and memorable, but never simple. Christopher Metress, English Literature in Translation

finely nuanced ... a complex study of a writer whose legacy remains striking and memorable, but never simple. * Christopher Metress, English Literature in Translation * It is one of the great achievements of Douglas Kerr's fine book that it reconciles the contradiction between Conan Doyles commitment to scientific thinking and his credulity over the Cottingley case. And this paradox is only one of many that Kerr exposes and addresses. Conan Doyle: Writing,Profession and Practice is thoroughly researched but wears its learning lightly; it is satisfyingly substantial but winningly elegant at the level of the sentence: it is a joy and an education to read. * Michael D. Hurley, The Cambridge Quarterly *

Author Information

Douglas Kerr was born in Scotland, educated at Cambridge and Warwick universities, and is a Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, where he has taught since 1979. He is the author of Wilfred Owen's Voices, George Orwell, and Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing. He first encountered Arthur Conan Doyle at the age of eleven and has been reading him ever since.

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