Irregular Readers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “six dirty scoundrels”, Boyhood and Literacy in Contemporary Sherlockian Children’s Literature

  • Erica Hateley
Keywords: Young adult literature, detective fiction, masculinity, literacy, adolescence, intertextuality

Abstract

Young adult (YA) literature is a socialising genre that encourages young readers to take up particular ways of relating to historical or cultural materials. The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed a boom in Sherlockian YA fiction using the Conan Doyle canon as a context and vocabulary for stories focused on the Baker Street Irregulars as figures of identification. This paper reads YA fiction’s deployment of Conan Doyle’s fictional universe as a strategy for negotiating anxieties of adolescent masculinity, particularly in relation to literacy and social agency.

Keywords: Young adult literature; detective fiction; masculinity; literacy;
adolescence; intertextuality

Published
2014-04-28
How to Cite
Hateley, E. (2014). Irregular Readers. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “six dirty scoundrels”, Boyhood and Literacy in Contemporary Sherlockian Children’s Literature. Barnboken, 37. https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v37i0.167
Section
Övriga artiklar/Other Articles