The Sherlock Holmes character first appeared in "A Study in Scarlet" in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. Serialized stories in The Strand Magazine from 1891 onwards gave the detective figure widespread popularity. By the 1920s, he had spawned a transmedia universe, consisting of adaptations (films, dramas, literary parodies) and journalistic paratexts; these originated in the UK and other European countries as well as in the US. Arthur Conan Doyle did relatively little to assert his intellectual property rights over adaptations, but paratexts regularly lauded him as the creator of the Great Detective. This chapter focuses on the early years of Sherlock Holmes. First, it traces the development of the character from the initial textual instantiations to the international transmedia universe of the early twentieth century. Textual analysis employed here is based on a character template consisting of demographics, psychological traits, habitual behaviors, speech patterns, physical appearance, relationships with secondary characters and geographical and temporal setting. Second, it explores the role of copyright and authorial authority. Third, it contrasts the long nineteenth-century character template with that of the early twenty-first century. It argues that these distinctions arise from the very different industrial underpinnings of the nineteenth- and twenty-first centuries' transmedia universes.

Aiming to contribute to character studies as an interdisciplinary field, this article sketches two particularly challenging conceptual problems that commonly reoccur in academic discussions about characters. On the one hand, this refers to the tension between characters' transmediality and medium specificity, which suggests that it is just as undesirable to overgeneralize from how characters are represented in one media form to how characters are represented in any or all other media forms as it is to undergeneralize by overemphasizing the differences between media forms and/or the characters they represent. On the other hand, and no less importantly, a fair bit of conceptual confusion seems to result from a range of scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical commitments using the term "character" to refer to very different phenomena. Drawing on a diverse set of existing research on characters across media forms, I propose to address the second problem by distinguishing between local work-specific characters, transmedia characters, transmedia character networks, transmedia character templates, and transmedia figures as different aspects of the complex assemblage of characters and character-like phenomena that current transmedia franchises commonly present. I then briefly explore how these distinctions are drawn quite differently in the context of the transmedia figures of Lara Croft and Spider-Man, the latter of which also seems to be defined by a staged "re-entry" of these very distinctions into the multidimensional storyworld of Marvel's "multiverse."

This chapter explores the emergence of two tiers of international television programs, high end and routine, and argues that the two types of content serve different functions in their import markets. The content’s cultural and temporal proximity to the import market determines the uses made of it by broadcasters as they attempt to appeal to their domestic audiences. But understanding these different functions requires complicating and nuancing the long-established concept of cultural proximity and developing the concept of temporal proximity. In the case studies, Sherlock and Elementary are used as exemplars of the high end and the routine. The first section establishes the distinction between high-end and routine drama; the second establishes the concept of the cultural proximity index; the third argues that Elementary is characterized by cultural accessibility; the fourth establishes the concept of the temporal proximity index in relation to high-end and routine television.

A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

A tide of high-quality television drama is sweeping the world. The new transnational television series has developed not only global appeal but innovative new modes of production, distribution, and reception. Nowhere is the transnational exchange of television drama more vital than between Britain and the United States, where it builds on more than sixty years of import, adaptation, coproduction, and fandom. This edited volume explores the transatlantic flow of television drama, focusing on key programs, industry strategies, critical debates, and audience reception, from an international roster of scholars and researchers. The chapters explore some of the most widely discussed programs on the transatlantic circuit. The book's first part focuses on media industries, tracing the history of transatlantic exchange and investigating contemporary practices such as coproduction, digital distribution, global partnerships, promotion, and branding. The second part concentrates on specific television texts and their negotiation of meaning across cultural contexts, exploring critical issues in the creation of transnational drama, such as heritage, proximity, performance, and self-reflexivity. Part III turns to the lively sphere of transatlantic fandom and commentary, including fan conventions, fan fiction, the role of both traditional and social media, and fan strategies for negotiating cultural differences. Transatlantic Television Drama provides a wide-ranging analysis of a phenomenon at the forefront of today’s television universe. It is focused on the serial dramatic programs that have gained the bulk of critical and popular attention and is particularly concerned with the impact of digital technologies on the production, distribution, and reception of television drama.

This chapter interrogates character identity in the two most recent Holmes television adaptations, Sherlock and Elementary. It uses discursive evidence from critical reviews, blogs, and Reddit discussion threads concerning the characterization of the Cumberbatch-Holmes (C-H) and the Miller-Holmes (M-H) to determine whether audiences judge the C-H and M-H as persuasive representations of the Great Detective and to identify the criteria involved in this evaluation. It speaks more widely to the question of audience acceptance or rejection of the rebooting, retconning, and general reconfiguring of iconic popular figures that occurs as producers seek either to extend their copyrighted characters' profitable lives across multiple decades and media or to further exploit characters in the public domain. The chapter hypothesizes that the hive mind has greater authority than narratologists to evaluate the consistency of new incarnations of fictional characters with canon and/or the transfiction as whole.

Aiming to contribute to character studies as an interdisciplinary field, this article sketches two particularly challenging conceptual problems that commonly reoccur in academic discussions about characters. On the one hand, this refers to the tension between characters' transmediality and medium specificity, which suggests that it is just as undesirable to overgeneralize from how characters are represented in one media form to how characters are represented in any or all other media forms as it is to undergeneralize by overemphasizing the differences between media forms and/or the characters they represent. On the other hand, and no less importantly, a fair bit of conceptual confusion seems to result from a range of scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical commitments using the term "character" to refer to very different phenomena. Drawing on a diverse set of existing research on characters across media forms, I propose to address the second problem by distinguishing between local work-specific characters, transmedia characters, transmedia character networks, transmedia character templates, and transmedia figures as different aspects of the complex assemblage of characters and character-like phenomena that current transmedia franchises commonly present. I then briefly explore how these distinctions are drawn quite differently in the context of the transmedia figures of Lara Croft and Spider-Man, the latter of which also seems to be defined by a staged "re-entry" of these very distinctions into the multidimensional storyworld of Marvel's "multiverse."

Painful OA is linked to CNS changes in pain processing. Temporal summation of pain (TSP) is a measure of one such CNS change, central sensitization. TSP is defined using a series (≥0.33Hz) of painful stimuli and is a predictor of postoperative pain, experienced by 20% of patients after total knee replacement (TKR) surgery. This study has developed a protocol to use functional MRI to assess CNS changes in OA pain processing.This pilot includes 3 participants with chronic knee OA pain awaiting TKR (62 ± 4.4) and 5 healthy volunteers (50 ± 13.6). 3-Tesla BOLD fMRI brain scans were recorded during short series of one second painful stimuli, applied using an automated inflatable cuff to the calf muscle of the leg with the affected knee or left side in healthy volunteers. The pain intensity at onset and during the 10 painful stimuli were recorded using a numerical rating scale. The pattern of brain activation was averaged across noxious stimuli, and the differential activation compared the 1st vs. 10th (last) s...

Los extensos y amplios universos de ficción construidos sobre una acumulación de múltiples textos han existido durante milenios; los dioses griegos, el dios cristiano, Robin Hood y el rey Arturo son solo algunos ejemplos de la tendencia de la humanidad hacia la forma narrativa. Narratólogos y estudiosos de los medios han abordado las relaciones narrativas e industriales en algunos universos de ficción expandidos. Sin embargo, se ha prestado menos atención a los factores narrativos e industriales específicos que permiten estrategias de producción particulares en la creación de ampliaciones. Unas ampliaciones que son aceptadas por los consumidores como parte de los universos de ficción establecidos previamente. Este capítulo ofrece algunas hipótesis acerca de la producción de estrategias de ampliación y cohesión en diferentes tipos de universos de ficción, utilizando para tal fin los casos de Sherlock Holmes, Batman y Star Trek. Palabras clave: Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Star Trek, Ampliación Diegética, Intertextualidad, Narratología.

Editorial for "Sherlock Holmes Fandom, Sherlockiana, and the Great Game," edited by Betsy Rosenblatt and Roberta Pearson, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 23 (March 15, 2017).