Tom Foster
English 348A, Studies in Popular Culture
Fall 2026
Course description
Topic: Holmes and Lovecraft Pastiche: The Aesthetics of Rewriting and the Practice of Critique
Required texts will be chosen from this list (please check with the bookstore before purchasing or ordering):
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, volume 1 (Bantam Classics edition)
Marvin Kaye, ed., The Game Is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales (Penguin Classics edition)
Ruthanna Emrys, Winter Tide
Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom
Essays and stories available as pdf files on the course Canvas site
Description: Contemporary accounts of fan culture and fan fiction as a practice (as collected on An Archive of One’s Own, for instance) usually emphasize media fandom, especially the response to Star Trek: The Original Series in the 1960s and 70s. However, many of the techniques for reimagining and intervening in a set of canonical narratives that have become associated with fan writing (filling in the timeline, character dislocation, genre-shifting, cross-overs, personalization and emotional intensification, shipping or slash, gender-flipping, race reversals) were pioneered by literary fandoms, most notably the devotees of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and stories (such as the Baker Street Irregulars group) and the Cthulhu Mythos writers who took H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction and weird tales as a kind of shared world to which they could contribute. This course will explore the historical roots of contemporary fan fiction in these two earlier literary fandoms.
We will be especially interested in thinking about the distinction between parody, mockery, or satire and the category of pastiche, a distinction that critics like Fredric Jameson have argued is central of postmodern literature and culture. Pastiche is briefly defined as a more neutral form of stylistic mimicry than parody, an attempt to write in another author’s voice. Classic pastiche often seems motivated by the desire simply to add more stories to the existing canon, stories that would conform as closely as possible to the originals, and therefore to constitute sequels or sometimes prequels to the originals. However, this kind of pastiche is characterized by an unavoidable internal tension between reproducing the conventions of the original stories and creating something new and original. There is always some degree of divergence from the original, as well as imitation, and this divergence makes pastiche an implicit critical commentary on the original works, to the extent that pastiche dramatizes a critical thesis about what is valuable in the original, and therefore worth reproducing, and what the limits or blind spots of the original stories are. We will therefore be interested in interpreting examples of Holmes and Lovecraft pastiche as critical commentaries on the original stories and as embodying both a different form of critical thinking and a model of reading as an active and creative response to the source text rather than an act of passive consumption. One of our goals will be to elaborate the collaborative aesthetic implied by pastiche and fan writing both as a model for literary art and invention and as a mode of critical thought, of thinking with an object of analysis rather than (or in addition to) against it.
The course will begin with some critical readings, and we will also discuss examples of Doyle and Lovecraft’s fiction, as well as samples of the history of Holmes and Lovecraft pastiche, along with some contemporary examples. We will attend to the significance of Sherlock Holmes as a figure of the kind of rationalism and empiricism typical of classic realism in literature, as well as the realist emphasis on totalization and inclusion at the social level, in contrast to Lovecraft’s horror fiction and its emphasis on the limits of rationality and what escapes or resists representation and human comprehension (what is usually referred to as “cosmic horror”). But we will primarily be interested in thinking about the different types of responses to Doyle and Lovecraft’s fiction in their pastiche traditions, differences based on techniques of rewriting as well as the various purposes of the rewritings (to merely add to the canon or to intervene politically, to make the original more realistic and relevant to later readers or to make the original stories more fantastic and less limited by realism). We will therefore focus on questions like what degree of divergence from the original is desirable and acceptable – that is, how far can such rewriting go before the original characters or fictional world becomes unrecognizable? The readings tend to highlight forms of Holmes pastiche that interrogate Victorian gender norms and forms of Lovecraft pastiche that interrogate the limits of the author’s notorious racism and resentment against immigrants, but also try to define the potential value of this kind of fiction for projects of racial representation.
Assignments: The grade for the course will be based on two formal essays, as well as participation and short, informal writing assignments.