A Study in Four Colours: The Case of the Chameleon Detective

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
First Episode ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Neil Gaiman ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literary Characters

Sherlock Holmes, one of the world's most famous detectives, is skilled at disguising himself and adjusting to different circumstances and yet remaining himself. Few literary characters lose so little in the process of adaptation, be it cinematic or literary, and I propose calling him a cultural chameleon: regardless of the palette and colour against which he is positioned – warm (scarlet and pink), cold (emerald), or black – he remains a brilliant sleuth. This paper compares four titles and four colours: A Study in Scarlet (1887), the first of the long-running series of texts by Doyle, and three instances of Holmes's adaptability to twenty-first century standards and expectations: ‘A Study in Emerald’ (2003), an award-winning short story by Neil Gaiman, ‘A Study in Pink’ (2010), the first episode of the BBC series Sherlock, and ‘A Study in Black’ (2012–13), a part of the Watson and Holmes comics series. Each background highlights different aspects of the detective's personality, but also sheds light on his approach to crime and criminals.

scholarly journals Tyrannous Minds and Tamed Bodies: The Curious Case of Irene Adler from Canon to Screen

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Debanjali Roy ◽  
◽  
Tanmoy Putatunda ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Gendered Power ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
Power Play

Appearing in the singular short story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the character of Irene Adler has been adapted and reconstructed in subsequent literary and visual media. Twenty-first century screen adaptations have swivelled upon postfeminist re-appropriations of the character and overt sexualisation of the ‘body’, thereby engaging in reassessment of the Irene-Sherlock relationship and problematizing gendered presentations of the character. Locating Irene in a heteronormative space, such narratives have attempted to revise the image of the cross-dressing ‘adventuress’ through varied portrayals which seemingly broaden her scope by means of her deliberate transgressions of fixed gender tropes. This article, by taking into account the gendered power-play embedded in three popular twenty first century screen adaptations of the text, namely, the films Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), CBS’s Elementary (2012-2019) and BBC’s Sherlock (2010-2017), scrutinizes the dilemma of presentation of Irene Adler through the lenses of sexual dynamics and gendered performances.

Playing (the Casino) Indian: Native American Roles in Peak TV

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 79-100
Author(s):  
Courtney Elkin Mohler
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
First Century ◽  
Character Type ◽  
House Of Cards ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Established Line ◽  
The Sopranos ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Big Love

The current television era, sometimes called “Peak TV,” was ushered in with serious creatordriven shows of the late 1990s. The increasingly frequent Indian character type of the manipulative, money-hungry, and usually criminal casino “chief”/CEO simultaneously offers dramatically significant guest-star roles for Native actors and reflects a neoliberal version of the Noble Savage fit for twenty-first century audiences. This article analyzes examples of the “casino Indian: characterization found in the award-winning television dramas The Sopranos, Big Love, The Killing and House of Cards. Adapting the figure of the imagined “Indian” to suit the anxieties of our political and economic moment, each of these critically acclaimed shows have created an image of “Indianness” in relation to “casinos” and thereby have added the casino Indian trope to the long-established line of “Indian” characters crafted by non-Native “experts,” writers, and artists of the stage and screen.

scholarly journals Animal Oppression and Solidarity: Examining Representations of Animals and Their Allies in Twenty-First Century Media

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Tayler Zavitz ◽  
Corie Kielbiski
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
First Century ◽  
Complex Media ◽  
Animal Suffering ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Human World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature And Film

Popular media, both literature and film, provide a location in which animal suffering, resistance and solidarity are finally visible. An examination of Bong Joon-ho’s award-winning film Okja (2017) and Karen Joy Fowler’s New York Timesbest-selling novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) reveals complex media representations of animals that highlight the significance of twenty-first century media in depicting the animal in the human world.

Adapting Kafka’s Ape to the Twenty-First Century: Gesture, Montage, and Performance in Antonietta De Lillo’s Il Signor Rotpeter

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernadette Luciano ◽  
Steele Burrow
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
First Century ◽  
First Person ◽  
Cinematic Adaptation ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Narrative Report

Abstract This article explores Italian filmmaker Antonietta De Lillo’s cinematic adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ in which she incorporates elements from both literary and visual media to create a ‘re-performance’ of an earlier performance, that of Kafka’s Rotpeter. De Lillo through the extensive use of gesture, montage, shift of focus, and other cinematic devices, interrupts and disrupts the narrative ‘report’ thereby ‘shocking’ the viewer in Brechtian fashion into an awareness of the fragility of identity and of the ‘ape’ nature that remains in all of us. De Lillo’s addition of an interview to Kafka’s monologue represents an innovation in Kafka adaptation and within this framework her first person/ape narrator Signor Rotpeter is allowed to respond to what she terms our ‘loss of humanity’. He provides first person/ape evidence of this loss both verbally and through his gestural complex, addressing the disconnect between young and old, the cruelty toward animals, and the violence of everyday life, prompting the viewer to reflect on the lives of those who, like the narrator Rotpeter, are desperately seeking a ‘way out’.

scholarly journals Queering the Anglo-Saxons through their psalms

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martine Mussies
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
King Alfred ◽  
Fiction Writer

For fan fiction based on the TV serial drama The Last Kingdom (2014–), some fan fiction authors use fragments of the translations of the Psalms by King Alfred of Wessex (849–899) to firmly ground their stories in the historical reimagination of the Anglo-Saxons. In the short story "Æthelflaed and Lagertha," fan fiction writer Bandi Crawford uses an Alfredian psalm to connect The Last Kingdom to another major TV series, Vikings (2013–). By developing bisexual and biromantic story lines along the lines of Alfredian psalms, the author constructs a twenty-first-century neomedieval-based culture in which the Alfredian psalms are reinterpreted or critically reexamined through a queer lens, thereby negotiating more diversity within a favorite show's story world.

Contemporary Feminism and Women's Short Stories

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Young
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
First Century ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Comprehensive Introduction ◽  
Contemporary Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Zadie Smith ◽  
The Moment

The short story has received renewed attention and notable popular acclaim in the twenty-first century. This book offers a wide-ranging survey of contemporary women’s short stories and introduces a new way of theorising feminism in the genre through the concept of ‘the moment’. By considering the prominent themes of motherhood, marriage, domesticity, sexuality, masculinity and femininity, this work engages with a spectrum of issues that are central to feminism today and, in the process, offers insightful new readings of the contemporary short story. Readers will find new perspectives on both canonical as well as lesser-discussed contemporary writers, including Kate Atkinson, Nicola Barker, A.S. Byatt, Aminatta Forna, Victoria Hislop, Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Hilary Mantel, Kate Mosse, Michèle Roberts, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Rose Tremain. While serving as a comprehensive introduction to the central themes of feminist politics, the study shows what makes the short story a desirable literary vehicle for creatively and critically contributing to feminist debates.

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