The typesetter of James Mcteigue’s The Raven: Poe’s dual fandom in post-millennial transmedia culture

Abstract

Over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Edgar Allan Poe’s characters and persona have thrived in ever mutating incarnations appealing to wider audiences around the world. Some of these Poe-inspired mash-up incarnations are instilling in the public new doses of enthusiasm and fervor for everything related to Poe’s work and persona. In our post-millennial transmedia culture Poe fans are actively engaged with refashioning and adapting everything they adore about Poe’s work and life. Thus, Poe fandom plays a pivotal role in disseminating new Poe-inspired adaptions across a wide array of media platforms. Thanks to what Henry Jenkins calls “participatory culture,” the post-millennial Poe has reached the status of an “industry unto itself.” After all, participatory culture, Jenkins concludes, “is anything but fringe or underground today.” However, as I try to argue, Poe’s ubiquitous presence in post-millennial popular culture has been boosted by a new phenomenon. I’m referring to the merging of modernized traits of two of the most popular characters ever to emerge from the pages of the mystery genre: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. The upshot of this is the convergence of the Poe fandom and the Sherlock fandom, two of the most active fandoms in transmedia culture. James McTeigue’s 2012 film The Raven tries to pander to the tastes of this dual fandom by capitalizing on the success of the BBC series Sherlock and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock movie adaptations, Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011).