Holmes and the Ripper: Versus Narratives

In versus narratives Sherlock Holmes is fighting or otherwise engaging Jack the Ripper. These texts pit the archetypal detective against the archetypal serial killer using established formulas as well as new narrative and generic features, a combination that results in their mass appeal among authors and audiences alike. The list of primary sources includes 120 titles - novels, short stories, plays, fanfiction, ’Grand Game’ studies, movies, TV shows, video and board games - which are treated as a dialogic network of transfictional and transmedial texts. This study unpacks the versus corpus in its media dispersal by analysing Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper as serial figures and culture-texts emphasising the increasing palimpsestousness of the former and the multidirectional polymorphousness of the latter, and tracing the overlapping Doylean culture-text. It also addresses the way character constellations are represented, negotiated, and fed back into the versus network, contextualising them within the coalescence of fact and fiction, Gothic and crime fiction frames, cultural memory, neo-Victorianism, and biofiction.

Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. She coordinates the research group ’From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria’ and initiated the Changing Narratives conference series. Her research combines neo-Victorian, crime fiction, and adaptation studies and focuses on the rewritings of Victorian villains and detectives.