The ideas and practices that bring a fictional character into reality.
In the second half of the twentieth century, American readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories—known as Sherlockians—worked together to create a world of Sherlock Holmes that crossed the boundary between reality and fiction. This book explores this Sherlockian world through an innovative lens informed both by geographical theories of spatiality as a process and literary scholarship readers’ active roles in making stories happen. In doing so, the work helps to define the contours of a world in which the ontological boundary ordinarily assumed between the actual and the fictional bends, blurs, and breaks.
Drawing extensively on the University of Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections, the world’s largest archive of Sherlockiana, this book shines new light on Sherlockian activities in the mid-to late-twentieth century. It was during this relatively understudied but creatively rich period that the imaginative foundations of the fandom as we know it were laid, and readers created a rich, ever-expanding world of Sherlock Holmes through a variety of textual and embodied practices: writing, mapping, playing, and walking.