The Game’s Afoot: Walking as Practice in Sherlockian Literary Geographies
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This article explores the relationship between readers’ embodied experiences in the world and the creative act of encountering fiction. In particular, it looks at three examples of Sherlock Holmes-inspired literary tourism. Their authors each use walking as a means of encountering the literary spaces of Arthur Conan Doyle’s texts and of deliberately adding to them, expanding the space of Holmes’s world beyond the page. By introducing the concept of ‘expansionary literary geography’, this article suggests that forms of embodied, worldly engagement with literature - whether derided as ‘literary fanship’ or celebrated as literary tourism - can also be forms of reading, acts of creative encounters with fiction, in their own right. Its argument proceeds through close readings of three Sherlockian texts - Arthur Axelrad’s