The Strand, Popular Culture and Late Capitalism

Where do we situate Arthur Conan Doyle and the Strand Magazine within the literary landscape of the later 1920s? What role do they play in the trends highlighted by David Ayers and with what kind of capacity to endorse or resist them? The reputation and commercial prestige of the Strand was finally hit by the cultural revolution which had been postponed by the First World War. Ayers's use of the term ‘late capitalism’ forces the twenty-first-century reader of the Strand to raise their eyes beyond the literary landscape and to contemplate the broader economic and political climate in which it continued to find a diminished readership. The status and validity of the phrase ‘late capitalism’ has been hotly disputed, but Ayers's periodisation is intriguing since it contradicts the canonical work of Ernst Mandel, whose Late Capitalism is explicit in identifying the term with the post-1940 landscape. This timeframe aligns the onset of ‘late capitalism’ with the age of ‘postmodernism’ and the two categories share some genetic tissue, at least in the theorisations of Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard.

The main flaw of ‘late capitalism’ as a concept is that it comes fully equipped with a sense of inevitable decline, seeming to predict a twilight of the capitalist gods. The term is not used here to act as a proxy vehicle for any certain predictions of the future but simply to describe the particular economic climate that emerged after 1918 and that played a substantial role in the production and distribution of all forms culture thereafter. Since none of the arguments of the theorists mentioned hitherto are treated as sacrosanct, we can tactfully withdraw from Ayers's implied critique of Mandel's periodisation.