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Sherlock Holmes and the mystery novel

Summary/Abstract: In this section of his seminal Theory of Prose (1925) Shklovsky outlines his approach to narrative prose. Focusing on narrative form, i.e. on the devices of plot construction, Shklovsky undertook empirical studies of countless novels. Having identified typical constructions, he used poetic tropes to classify them and to develop the concept of a narrative trope. Shklovsky choses a somewhat different path in his study on Arthur Conan Doyle’s crime novels: treating them as one text, he attempts to uncover an invariable schema in their plots, thus anticipating Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928).

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