Holmes and the Ripper

"Lucyna Krawczyk-Zywko’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-Zywko 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 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. Lucyna Krawczyk-Zywko 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.