Abstract
Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, one of his most financially successful stories, is not so much a fantasy of ‘policing’ Victorian society and its wealthy class (as it appears in part to be), as it is a subtle unwriting of a policed society and the related securities of semiotic, financial, professional, and scientific processes. This is effected through the sign of the detective — his depersonalization, his interchangeability with the villain, his marks of utter professionalism — as well as in narrative signs of capitalism's appropriative centrality to all the agents and events in the novel. The process of reading thus becomes an alternative semiotics of the marketplace, in which codes of capitalism's alienating and displacing power are written into, and work in contrast to, the linear narrative of the detective's prowess and his triumph over the villain.
About the author
Robbie B. H. Goh (b. 1964) is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are nineteenth-century literature, social semiotics of race and class, Christianity in Asia, and postcolonial studies. His recent publications include ‘Asian Christian networks: Transnational structures and geopolitical mappings’ (2004); Christianity in Southeast Asia (2005); Contours of Culture: Space and Social Dierence in Singapore (2005); and ‘The Internet and Christianity in Asia: Cultural trends, structures, and transformations’ (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
