Irregular readers : Arthur Conan Doyle’s “six dirty scoundrels”, boyhood and literacy in contemporary Sherlockian children’s literature

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.

Free Sherlock: The copyright battle of Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes faces his greatest challenge – since his fight to the death with Professor James Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls. Who owns Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest detective? Is it the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Or the mysterious socialite Andrea Plunket? Or does Sherlock Holmes belong to the public? This is the question currently being debated in copyright litigation in the United States courts, raising larger questions about copyright law and the public domain, the ownership of literary characters, and the role of sequels, adaptations, and mash-ups.

Members abroad - Australia - Brisbane and the Gold Coast

Brisbane's sub-tropical climate, vegetation and urban history as a British settlement, endow the region with many characteristics that are familiar in KwaZulu-Natal. Brisbane settlement, firstly as a penal conlony to accommodate the hardiest criminals dispatched from Sydney, was established in 1825 on a wide river, several kilometers upstream from Moreton Bay with the Pacific Ocean beyond. The penal colony was short lived and was soon opened up to free settlement in 1842. The growth of the fledgling town was characterized by brick warehouse and service buildings to the port that was established on its riverbanks, resembling those of the old Point Road area in Durban. Government and administration buildings heralded Brisbane as the captial city of the State of Queensland, annexed from New South Wales in 1859. Morphological studies reveal that Brisbane had reached its first zenith around 1930 as a commerical city of four and five storey buildings. The urban form remained stagnant until the post-1960's building boom and the developments from this period on, consolidated land amalgamations largely ignoring the urban characteristics of the established city. Public space was poorly observed, resulting in a city that had turned its back on the river. It is only in recent times that the currency of good urban design, under the custodial direction of the City Council, has fostered a re-engagemed urban realm that, enabled by the recent building boom, has delivered high quality urban environments

Sherlockian adolescence for the twenty-first century : Conan Doyle’s ‘six dirty little scoundrels’ and contemporary children’s literature

Young adult literature is a socialising genre that encourages young readers to take up very particular ways of relating to historical or cultural materials. Recent years have seen a boom in Sherlockian YA fiction inviting reader identification either with the Baker Street Irregulars or an adolescent Holmes. In works by Anthony Read, Andrew Lane, Tracy Mack & Michael Citrin, and Tony Lee, the Sherlock canon provides a vocabulary for neo-Victorian young adult fiction to simultaneously invoke and defer a range of competing visions of working childhood as both at-risk and autonomous; of education as both oppression and emancipation; and of literary-cultural history as both populist and elitist. Such tensions can be traced in Conan Doyle’s own constructions of working children, and in the circulation of the Sherlock stories as popular or literary fictions. Drawing both on the Sherlock canon and its revisions, this paper reads current YA fiction’s deployment of Conan Doyle’s fictional universe as a tool for negotiating contemporary anxieties of adolescence.

The role of the internet and digital technologies in the struggle for recognition of the forgotten Australians

Our contemporary public sphere has seen the 'emergence of new political rituals, which are concerned with the stains of the past, with self disclosure, and with ways of remembering once taboo and traumatic events' (Misztal, 2005). A recent case of this phenomenon occurred in Australia in 2009 with the apology to the 'Forgotten Australians': a group who suffered abuse and neglect after being removed from their parents – either in Australia or in the UK - and placed in Church and State run institutions in Australia between 1930 and 1970. This campaign for recognition by a profoundly marginalized group coincides with the decade in which the opportunities of Web 2.0 were seen to be diffusing throughout different social groups, and were considered a tool for social inclusion. This paper examines the case of the Forgotten Australians as an opportunity to investigate the role of the internet in cultural trauma and public apology. As such, it adds to recent scholarship on the role of digital web based technologies in commemoration and memorials (Arthur, 2009; Haskins, 2007; Cohen and Willis, 2004), and on digital storytelling in the context of trauma (Klaebe, 2011) by locating their role in a broader and emerging domain of social responsibility and political action (Alexander, 2004).