巴斯克村猎犬

Sherlock Holmes appeared during a period in which detectives were appearing more and more as central characters in popular fiction. Some early examples include Inspector Bucket in Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Sergeant Cuff and Frankiln Blake in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. But Sherlock Holmes had soon revolutionized the genre by dint of his scientific methods of deduction, which produced an entirely new way of writing detective fiction.The Hound of the Baskervilles skillfully merges detective fiction with the fin-de-siècle revival of Gothic literature, and places Sherlock between the Baskerville family curse and a crafty criminal plotting against the life of his client.The narrative is divided into two sections. One tells the story from the rational view point of Holmes, and is marked by cool and logical analysis; the other records the events as seen and experienced by Dr. Watson upon his visit to Baskerville Hall, and is founded upon the Gothic elements of unease, suspense, and a cloying sense of fear.The setting of the novel is equally divided into two different types of landscape in accordance with the narrative and befitting atmosphere. On the one hand, Baskerville Hall is gloomy, melancholy, and placed in the midst of a fog-shrouded moorland, which affects the events taking place in it and gives them a touch of the sinister and the Gothic. On the other hand, London between Holmes' apartment and the hotel in which Henry Baskerville resides is characterized by an urban and rational aura, which sets the complications faced by the latter on a human plane of a criminal nature.Among the Gothic literary traditions present in the novel, there is the sense of past guilt and irreversible fate, which can be found in the physical resemblance between Hugo Baskerville and his equally wicked descendent Jack Stapleton; a resemblance which included not only their physical traits but had also spread to their criminal tendencies as well.