Sherlock Holmes’s Britain Through History, Literature, and Film

Perhaps the spookiest Sherlock Holmes mystery, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) is an iconic detective tale set within a gothic landscape and literary genre.

In this interdisciplinary course, students read the novel, analyze related primary sources, and screen selected film and television adaptations in order to consider tensions between themes of rationalism and the supernatural as well as Britishness and Empire in the late Victorian and early Edwardian periods.

Students also explore Conan Doyle's life and work, including his literary career and the invention of the most popular detective of all time, his relationship to colonialism and South Africa's bloody Boer War, his medical career and commitment to the scientific method, and his passionate promotion of Spiritualism and communication with the dead.