SOURCE: Kestner, Joseph A. “‘Real’ Men: Construction of Masculinity in the Sherlock Holmes Narratives.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 29, no. 1 (spring 1996): 73-88.

In the following essay, Kestner explains how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories influenced Victorian conceptions of masculinity.

If we understand masculinity as a constant contradictory struggle rather than just the privileged position within a power disequilibrium, we come closer to a full definition of gender studies.

Stearns 108

In Critical Practice, Catherine Belsey describes a theory of reading and a theory of text generation integral to the practices of the nineteenth century—“the theory of expressive realism”: “This is the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one … individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as true” (7). Belsey then observes:

Expressive realism belongs roughly to the last century and a half, the...