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Palgrave Macmillan

Holmes and the Ripper

Versus Narratives

  • Book
  • © 2024

Overview

Authors:
  1. Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko

    1. University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

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  • Examines over 100 versus narratives featuring Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper
  • Depicts the versus narratives as dialogic, transtextual, and transmedial
  • Considers cultural memory, neo-Victorianism, and discourses within adaptation and crime studies

Part of the book series: Crime Files (CF)

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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 1-21

  3. Enter Holmes and Jack

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 23-43

  4. Parallel Culture-Texts

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 45-72

  5. The Versus Storyworld

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 73-93

  6. Palimpsestuous Holmes

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 95-115

  7. Polymorphous Jack

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 117-136

  8. (Mis)Remembering Secondary Characters

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 137-160

  9. Neo-Casting or Decentring the Great Detective

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 161-180

  10. Detective Doyle

    • Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
    Pages 181-200

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 201-214
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Keywords

About this book

In versus narratives Sherlock Holmes is fighting or otherwise engaging Jack the Ripper. These texts pit the archetypal detective against the archetypal serial killer using established formulas as well as new narrative and generic features, a combination that results in their mass appeal among authors and audiences alike. The list of primary sources includes 120 titles – novels, short stories, plays, fanfiction, ‘Grand Game’ studies, movies, TV shows, video and board games – which are treated as a dialogic network of transfictional and transmedial texts. This study unpacks the versus corpus in its media dispersal by analysing Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper as serial figures and culture-texts emphasising the increasing palimpsestousness of the former and the multidirectional polymorphousness of the latter, and tracing the overlapping Doylean culture-text. It also addresses the way character constellations are represented, negotiated, and fed back into the versus network, contextualising them within the coalescence of fact and fiction, Gothic and crime fiction frames, cultural memory, neo-Victorianism, and biofiction.

Reviews

"Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko’s ambitious study pursues the endlessly intriguing parallel textual lives of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. The strange case that she sets out to solve is the extensive but neglected corpus of versus narratives: texts in which the great detective sets out to defeat the Whitechapel murderer. Krawczyk-Żywko convincingly reads these works as part of a rich textual constellation influenced by the overlapping Sherlockian and Ripperological culture texts. Her book’s focus will inevitably intrigue aficionados of Holmes and its insights into aspects of adaptation, neo-Victorianism and biofiction mean it will also appeal strongly to scholars in these areas." (Dr Chris Louttit, Radboud University, The Netherlands)

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko

About the author

Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. She coordinates the research group 'From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria' and initiated the Changing Narratives conference series. Her research combines neo-Victorian, crime fiction, and adaptation studies and focuses on the rewritings of Victorian villains and detectives.

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