The Sherlock Holmes magazine and the configuration of the detective fiction reader

Abstract

Sherlock Holmes, weekly magazine which was published between 1911 and 1913, was characterized by being the first publication dedicated exclusively to the chronicle and the police story in Buenos Aires. This feature makes it a privileged material to study how the field of gender conforms at the beginning of the 20th century. In this article, we intend to analyze how the journal contributed to the process of formation of a reading public fond of criminal fictions. In this sense, we consider that Sherlock Holmes was built, from the deployment of a number of different strategies, a reader model which, based on the perceptual matrix of the classic crime fiction, promoted the different ways of reading of the detective fiction reader.