This thesis analyses how the character and stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle have been adapted in season three and four of the BBC’s Sherlock and how the character of the detective develops...Show moreThis thesis analyses how the character and stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle have been adapted in season three and four of the BBC’s Sherlock and how the character of the detective develops throughout these two seasons. This analysis was performed through the lenses of both Adaptation Theory (Hutcheon, Joyce, Kline) and Character Studies (Eder, Jannadis & Schneider, Redmond), in order to achieve a complete picture as to how the character of Sherlock Holmes was adapted from Doyle’s stories and further developed for the television series. This study, first critically explores the stories and the character of Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories and how the detective handles the situations in which he finds himself as well as how he interacts with other characters. The second chapter studies the development of the character of Sherlock throughout both seasons of the series, with an emphasis on season three, as well as explore the cases Sherlock gets involved in, since they are starting to bleed into his personal life. The third chapter focuses on season four of BBC Sherlock, in which the character of Sherlock and his relationships completely overshadow the cases, shifting the series towards the genre of melodrama. The series is compared to the content of Doyle's stories throughout all chapter in order to explore how the creators of the television series adapted the Victorian Holmes to a twenty-first century Sherlock.Show less
This thesis focuses on the representation of masculinity in the Sherlock Holmes character, both in the original stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as...Show moreThis thesis focuses on the representation of masculinity in the Sherlock Holmes character, both in the original stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as in the modern BBC interpretation which first aired in 2010. It employs a Foucauldian notion of gender, which sees masculinity as a socially constructed concept and as such perceptible to change. The Sherlock Holmes stories were written over a forty-year time period. Two major historical events from this period could be said to have influenced the definition of masculinity, namely the Oscar Wilde trials and the First World War. Furthermore, Joseph Kestner has argued that Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories aimed to promote an ideal form of masculinity, which led us to consider the representation of Victorian masculinity in the Holmes character. Moreover, this thesis analyses the adaptation of Victorian Holmes in BBC’s Sherlock. Having defined Victorian and twenty-first-century masculinity, we will see that Conan Doyle’s Holmes aligns with numerous Victorian traits that were seen as masculine, and is portrayed as the ideal man. He is heroic, strong, brave, moral, rational and creative. Similarly, BBC Holmes aligns with masculine ideals of the twenty-first century but does not seem to personify the ideal man. He is strong, rational and creative, but his heroism is ambiguous, as well as his morality.Show less
