The Aventures OfSherlock Holmes

In this spirited addition to Twayne's Masterworks Studies, Victorian literature scholar Rosemary Jann serves up a thoroughly engaging examination of Doyle's masterpiece. With her lens focused sharply on the issue of social order as manifested in Adventures, Jann begins her analysis with an illuminating portrait of the literary and historical milieu from which Holmes emerged. What follows is a consistently stimulating reading of the text, inspecting, among other topics, narrative structure, the social aspects of detective fiction, the implications of Holmes's detection methods for conceptions of crime and social order, and Adventures's assumptions about the "problematic" nature of female sexuality. Throughout the study, Jann groups and evaluates the 12 stories composing Adventures, probing each for what it tells us about social order, both in Doyle's time and in our own. "The adventures of Sherlock Holmes," Jann maintains, "will always retain their definitive place in detection fiction because they work its magic with unparalleled wit and assurance, embracing crime, irrationality, and evil, in order ultimately to reassert justice, reason, and right." A study that not only enlightens but entertains readers from first page to last, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order contributes fresh new perspectives to the extant literature and, as such, is sure to attract students, scholars, and the legions of Holmes aficionados.