Parallel Culture-Texts

Both Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes experienced a hiatus: the former for almost 40 days, and the latter for almost a decade between Doyle’s publications – or 3 years in his life as a character. The absences of the notorious criminal and the cherished detective created a perfect opportunity for the recycling of the already familiar elements into new networks of texts. Holmes’s and the Ripper’s adaptations and appropriations keep creating their separate but parallel and sometimes converging culture-texts, which are delineated in the following pages. The subchapters identify their similarities and differences, starting with the early rewritings and expansions of both figures. Their independence from medial or temporal constraints is contrasted with their apparent reliance on particular sets of signifiers, their spatial freedom with their London ties and trails, and their fans and afficionados with transnational scholars. Drawing on two immense areas of research, this chapter is setting the scene for the discussion of the versus storyworld.