Book Chapters by Dave McLaughlin
Creating Heritage for Tourism, 2018
Between 1983 and 2001 an American lawyer named David Hammer, a self-confessed fan of Arthur Conan... more Between 1983 and 2001 an American lawyer named David Hammer, a self-confessed fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, wrote a series of ‘Sherlockian’ travel guides to England. Hammer’s series provides a case study of the role that ordinary people, not authors or tourism promoters, have played in the production of heritage as a tourist commodity in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. I argue here that David Hammer used his travel guides as a means of creating Sherlock Holmes’s England as a material manifestation of this idea of Holmes as heritage: one that could and should be visited by Sherlockian reader-tourists. He used pieces of England’s Holmes-related past – places from Doyle’s life, locations from the Sherlock Holmes stories, and even sites from his own past – to create a new story of the past for Sherlockians: one that made tourism into a necessary part of the Sherlockian reader’s experience.
Papers by Dave McLaughlin
Literary Geographies, 2019
In September 2018 a group of literary geographers again gathered in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, ... more In September 2018 a group of literary geographers again gathered in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to discuss current concerns and the future direction of this interdiscipline. The theme for 2018 was ‘collaboration’. This introduction provides a brief overview of the definitions and practices of collaboration in literary geography which were developed at the conference, as well as introducing the first group of Thinking Space pieces to emerge from those discussions.
In this short paper I argue that teaching literary geography to university students can encourage... more In this short paper I argue that teaching literary geography to university students can encourage them to consider the variety of ways in which they, as readers and as young geographers, approach and create literary spaces. Relatedly, it can help us as practitioners to recognise the variety of voices, both critical and not, that contribute to the creation of literary space and its interactions with other spaces.
Literary Geographies journal was first published in 2015 with a commitment to encouraging ‘cross-... more Literary Geographies journal was first published in 2015 with a commitment to encouraging ‘cross-fertilisations at the juncture where geography and literature meet’ (Hones et al. 2015: 1). This commitment is nowhere more apparent than in the number of special issues in recent years which have grown out of conference panels. After all, conferences are spaces where, unleashed temporarily from the disciplinary shackles which constrain our day-to-day working lives, cross-fertilisations can be seeded and can grow. This special collection of Thinking Space pieces is no different. The short but compelling pieces collected here are the product of a conference on literary geographies held in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in March 2017. This international gathering of geographers, literary scholars, literary cartographers and literary geographers was greatly encouraged by the editors of this journal to further the intellectual interactions between scholars working in this discipline – and to better help its advancement. In this introduction to the eleven Thinking Space pieces collected here I provide a context for the ideas they put forward and they debates they illuminate.
This article explores the relationship between readers' embodied experiences in the world and the... more This article explores the relationship between readers' embodied experiences in the world and the creative act of encountering fiction. In particular, it looks at three examples of Sherlock Holmes-inspired literary tourism. Their authors each use walking as a means of encountering the literary spaces of Arthur Conan Doyle's texts and of deliberately adding to them, expanding the space of Holmes's world beyond the page. By introducing the concept of 'expansionary literary geography', this article suggests that forms of embodied, worldly engagement with literature-whether derided as 'literary fanship' or celebrated as literary tourism-can also be forms of reading, acts of creative encounters with fiction, in their own right. Its argument proceeds through close readings of three Sherlockian texts-Arthur Axelrad's On the Scent (1984), David Hammer's A Dangerous Game (1997), and Richard Warner's Guide Book and Instructions for the Ascent of Holmes Peak (1985). It is demonstrated that through the power of walking to combine embodied experience of the actual world with acts of memory and imagination, the three authors' travels work to inscribe the Sherlock Holmes texts into the world. In this way, their walking and its representation become a form of both reading and writing, a physical experience of the unfolding of narrative in time and space, and a contribution to the imaginative expansion of Holmes's world.
This special section started its life as papers delivered at the American Association of Geograph... more This special section started its life as papers delivered at the American Association of Geographers meeting in 2015, in two panels which broadly considered the relationships between 'the work and the world'. Those panels explored the various ways in which literatures overspill their textual boundaries and interact with the world. The papers that were delivered together suggested that the space of 'the work', or literature, or art, is not necessarily distanced from the spaces of the world. From studies of mobility as a theme in literary representations, to new ways of mapping, and histories of travel and writing, these papers each argue that literary works are necessarily bound up in extra-textual space, and these extra-textual spaces are constituent parts of literature. Joining these papers is a mutual recognition that being mobile is as important as being in place for people's encounters with fiction. The interactions of mobile people with texts are used by each author as a way to think through the various expressions and consequences of the embodied and experiential act of encountering literature. In this special issue, we consider how the dynamic relationships between reader and text, person and world, can reverberate on literary creation and recreation. We demonstrate a variety of ways in which the space of literature and literature's relationship to the extra-textual world are being theorised within the broad church of literary geography. .
Book Reviews by Dave McLaughlin
Social and Cultural Geography, 2021
cultural geographies, 2020
Literary Geographies, 2020
Pre-print edition of my review of Sheila Hones (2014) Literary Geographies Literary Geographies:... more Pre-print edition of my review of Sheila Hones (2014) Literary Geographies Literary Geographies: Narrative Space in Let The Great World Spin
Conference Presentations by Dave McLaughlin
Literary maps have long been a popular way for readers to gain entry into fictional worlds and th... more Literary maps have long been a popular way for readers to gain entry into fictional worlds and the fictional representations of real places. However, the route they trace between actual world experiences and novelistic representations often leaves them at an ontological distance from both.
In this paper I will explore how Sherlockian tourist and traveller Arthur Axelrad sought to circumvent this ontological distance, and to create a literary tour of London that would shore up his belief in Holmes's existence, by producing a new kind of literary map that combined cartography, textual narrative and the readers' own experiences of the world; a map that is always becoming and never completed.
This paper was delivered at Borders and Crossings, the 12th Annual Interdisciplinary Travel Writi... more This paper was delivered at Borders and Crossings, the 12th Annual Interdisciplinary Travel Writing Conference, Queen's University Belfast; and at the Transatlantic Dialogues on Cultural Heritage Conference, organised by the University of Birmingham.
In his Sherlockian travel guide to Europe, David Hammer uses actual world historical sources, including contemporary Baedeker guides, alongside Sherlockian-inspired research into Holmes's life, and his own walking through the world, to re-inscribe onto the European landscape a new history, which blends fact and fiction, and which is in his words a form of heritage, which "surely constitutes a significant form of reality".
In this paper delivered at an interdisplinary conference on Placing the Author: Literary Tourism ... more In this paper delivered at an interdisplinary conference on Placing the Author: Literary Tourism in the Long Nineteenth Century, I introduced the idea that Sherlockian literary tourism sits at an angle to the received histories of literary tourism and reader engagement. Through a reading of David Hammer's 1997 Sherlockian travel book, A Dangerous Game: Being a Guide to the Europe of Sherlock Holmes, I demonstrated how the whole book is designed to take the author, Doyle, out of his place, in space, in time and in reality, and recast him as the transient, ethereal 'literary agent' who haunts Sherlock Holmes's world, as a reminder of its simultaneous reality and unreality.
In this paper, through a reading of Australian guidebooks about Britain, I discuss how young Aust... more In this paper, through a reading of Australian guidebooks about Britain, I discuss how young Australian travellers rejected the received wisdom that the country languished under the 'tyranny of distance' from Britain and Europe. Instead, I show how many travellers embraced this distance as a marker of Australia's modernity. This was accompanied by the growth of an 'antipodean gaze' which turned the tropes of 'otherness' and 'oppositeness' back onto Britain, remade as a foreign and strange land.
Devotees of Sherlock Holmes have long pushed the boundaries of Canonical knowledges about Holmes'... more Devotees of Sherlock Holmes have long pushed the boundaries of Canonical knowledges about Holmes's life. In this paper I use Brewer's idea of imaginative expansion to consider how Sherlockians have used the idea of Holmes's mobility as a spur to textually expand the geographical boundaries of Holmes's world.
This paper explores the role that objects play in facilitating detection in Arthur Conan Doyle's ... more This paper explores the role that objects play in facilitating detection in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I argue that Holmes's gaze reads things and people in similar ways, blending the organic and the inorganic, producing new forms of seeing and detection.
Working papers by Dave McLaughlin
Sherlock Holmes has had a long afterlife as a character of public use. In 2013, in America, this ... more Sherlock Holmes has had a long afterlife as a character of public use. In 2013, in America, this fact was given legal authority by the American courts. In this paper, I consider the role played by representations of geographical mobility in fan fictions about Sherlock Holmes in distancing the character from his Canonical origins and 'commoning' him.
I use Brewer's theory of 'imaginative expansion' and his metaphor of the 'textual commons' to identify the ways in which fans have 'commoned' Holmes - through building on Doyle's story's 'rough edges' and contributing to the 'felt iterability' of Holmes, to adapting the 'felt (im)materiality' of the character by imagining him as a real person.
I also raise the question why Sherlockian fan fictions always seem to imagine Holmes existing in the real world. I briefly consider evidence that not all readers have imagined the character this way and throw out the question why this might be.
"“Human beings are attached to Things; Things attach themselves to humans. If we keep a close eye... more "“Human beings are attached to Things; Things attach themselves to humans. If we keep a close eye on Things we’ll find the murderer.”
( Three Bags Full, Leonie Swann)
Sherlock Holmes may well be one of the most famous (albeit fictional) practitioners of “thinking with things”. For Holmes, clues take a particularly material form; his ‘deductive reasoning’ relies on “the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace” (A Case of Identity), which more often than not escapes the attention of his professional colleagues. Doyle’s focus on material clues helped to ensure the stories’ lasting popularity and influenced generations of readers to ape Holmes’s technique of ‘thinking with things’.
This paper seeks to explore the importance of things to Sherlock Holmes, as both material evidence and as objects in themselves. Holmes’s superior ability to ‘read’ or ‘observe’ the uncanny or unusual in everyday objects, to which Doyle’s readers aspired themselves, marks him out from the other inhabitants of his world. Is this because he possesses greater acuity of perception, or do the objects themselves talk to him? The latter hypothesis has greater attraction when it is realized that Holmes’s meaning-making, so important in bring each story to its dénouement, is often riddled with loopholes and precariously unstable."
Uploads
Book Chapters by Dave McLaughlin
Papers by Dave McLaughlin
Book Reviews by Dave McLaughlin
Conference Presentations by Dave McLaughlin
In this paper I will explore how Sherlockian tourist and traveller Arthur Axelrad sought to circumvent this ontological distance, and to create a literary tour of London that would shore up his belief in Holmes's existence, by producing a new kind of literary map that combined cartography, textual narrative and the readers' own experiences of the world; a map that is always becoming and never completed.
In his Sherlockian travel guide to Europe, David Hammer uses actual world historical sources, including contemporary Baedeker guides, alongside Sherlockian-inspired research into Holmes's life, and his own walking through the world, to re-inscribe onto the European landscape a new history, which blends fact and fiction, and which is in his words a form of heritage, which "surely constitutes a significant form of reality".
Working papers by Dave McLaughlin
I use Brewer's theory of 'imaginative expansion' and his metaphor of the 'textual commons' to identify the ways in which fans have 'commoned' Holmes - through building on Doyle's story's 'rough edges' and contributing to the 'felt iterability' of Holmes, to adapting the 'felt (im)materiality' of the character by imagining him as a real person.
I also raise the question why Sherlockian fan fictions always seem to imagine Holmes existing in the real world. I briefly consider evidence that not all readers have imagined the character this way and throw out the question why this might be.
( Three Bags Full, Leonie Swann)
Sherlock Holmes may well be one of the most famous (albeit fictional) practitioners of “thinking with things”. For Holmes, clues take a particularly material form; his ‘deductive reasoning’ relies on “the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace” (A Case of Identity), which more often than not escapes the attention of his professional colleagues. Doyle’s focus on material clues helped to ensure the stories’ lasting popularity and influenced generations of readers to ape Holmes’s technique of ‘thinking with things’.
This paper seeks to explore the importance of things to Sherlock Holmes, as both material evidence and as objects in themselves. Holmes’s superior ability to ‘read’ or ‘observe’ the uncanny or unusual in everyday objects, to which Doyle’s readers aspired themselves, marks him out from the other inhabitants of his world. Is this because he possesses greater acuity of perception, or do the objects themselves talk to him? The latter hypothesis has greater attraction when it is realized that Holmes’s meaning-making, so important in bring each story to its dénouement, is often riddled with loopholes and precariously unstable."
In this paper I will explore how Sherlockian tourist and traveller Arthur Axelrad sought to circumvent this ontological distance, and to create a literary tour of London that would shore up his belief in Holmes's existence, by producing a new kind of literary map that combined cartography, textual narrative and the readers' own experiences of the world; a map that is always becoming and never completed.
In his Sherlockian travel guide to Europe, David Hammer uses actual world historical sources, including contemporary Baedeker guides, alongside Sherlockian-inspired research into Holmes's life, and his own walking through the world, to re-inscribe onto the European landscape a new history, which blends fact and fiction, and which is in his words a form of heritage, which "surely constitutes a significant form of reality".
I use Brewer's theory of 'imaginative expansion' and his metaphor of the 'textual commons' to identify the ways in which fans have 'commoned' Holmes - through building on Doyle's story's 'rough edges' and contributing to the 'felt iterability' of Holmes, to adapting the 'felt (im)materiality' of the character by imagining him as a real person.
I also raise the question why Sherlockian fan fictions always seem to imagine Holmes existing in the real world. I briefly consider evidence that not all readers have imagined the character this way and throw out the question why this might be.
( Three Bags Full, Leonie Swann)
Sherlock Holmes may well be one of the most famous (albeit fictional) practitioners of “thinking with things”. For Holmes, clues take a particularly material form; his ‘deductive reasoning’ relies on “the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace” (A Case of Identity), which more often than not escapes the attention of his professional colleagues. Doyle’s focus on material clues helped to ensure the stories’ lasting popularity and influenced generations of readers to ape Holmes’s technique of ‘thinking with things’.
This paper seeks to explore the importance of things to Sherlock Holmes, as both material evidence and as objects in themselves. Holmes’s superior ability to ‘read’ or ‘observe’ the uncanny or unusual in everyday objects, to which Doyle’s readers aspired themselves, marks him out from the other inhabitants of his world. Is this because he possesses greater acuity of perception, or do the objects themselves talk to him? The latter hypothesis has greater attraction when it is realized that Holmes’s meaning-making, so important in bring each story to its dénouement, is often riddled with loopholes and precariously unstable."