5 - Achieving Respectability among Critics (1991–2000)

Summary

While Harold Orel was certainly correct to say in 1992 that “the status of Doyle's posthumous reputation is not fixed” (17), by that time a critical reassessment of Doyle's work was well under way. Doyle's science fiction, adventure fiction, and even the historical novels became subjects of critical inquiry; the Holmes stories, however, attracted the lion's share of attention from critics, particularly those approaching literary study from new theoretical perspectives. The reasons for this new interest can be traced to advances in the study of detective fiction as a major literary genre. As David Trotter observed in 1991, “detective fiction has become the most frequently and most intensively theorised of all popular genres. It suits the hermeneutic requirements of almost any form of theoretical enquiry you care to mention: narratology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction” (66). During the 1990s, critics employing these and other new methodologies continued a revaluation of Doyle's literary achievements and the ideology his fiction promotes. As a result, the decades-long tendency of academics to ignore the Holmes stories “because they lack the stylistic complexity, moral ambiguity, and intricate psychology that are the commonplaces of modernism” (Joseph McLaughlin 2000, 27) was replaced by close readings of the kind hitherto reserved for works considered more “serious.” As Christopher Metress argues persuasively, the Holmes stories “not only can withstand the pressure of high critical seriousness, they demand it” (1994a, 40).

Criticism of Doyle's fiction published during the decade is a mixture of traditional and new methodologies. Studies focusing on Doyle's work ranged from traditional analyses of character (Kelly 1998) to discussions of intertextuality (Sweeney 1991), psychoanalytic readings (Batail 1997), theoretical analyses of urban life and suburbia at the end of the nineteenth century (Langbauer 1999, Hapgood 2000), and examinations of narrative techniques and perspective (Levine 1997). On occasion the Holmes stories were used to illuminate the work of other authors (Moreland 1997). Other articles provided insight into the way Doyle's medical training influenced his fiction (Furst 2000, Krasner 2000). In many of these discussions, one finds frequent references to Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and other theorists (as well as to Freud, whose relationship to Doyle's detective fiction remained a subject for scholarly investigation). While the majority of these essays focus on tales featuring Holmes, others contain useful and illuminating commentary on Doyle's other writings, particularly the tales featuring Professor Challenger (Ruddick 1993, Hoppenstand 1999a, Hoppenstand 1999b).