Product Description: Once a controversial genre of Victorian fiction that produced the major best sellers of its century, the now-forgotten sensation novel was a publishing phenomenon in its time. In a vivid portrait of this subversive and discomfiting popular literature, Winifred Hughes identifies its ingredients, its practitioners, and its implications, and reveals its significance both for the mid-Victorian consciousness and for the writers and readers of today...read more

This work adopts a fresh approach by relating the vogue in the 1860s for sensation fiction to a specific phase of a crisis of faith in the bourgeois ideology of self-help. The demise of sensation fiction after a mere decade is then associated with a returned sense in the 1870s of the durability of the status quo, and the temporary revival of a moralism, which had seemed in a terminal condition in the 1860s.

In 1859 the popular novelist Wilkie Collins wrote of a ghostly woman, dressed from head to toe in white garments, laying her cold, thin hand on the shoulder of a young man as he walked home late one evening. His novel The Woman in White became hugely successful and popularised a style of writing that came to be known as sensation fiction. This Companion highlights the energy, the impact and the inventiveness of the novels that were written in 'sensational' style, including the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Florence Marryat. It contains fifteen specially-commissioned essays and includes a chronology and a guide to further reading. Accessible yet rigorous, this Companion questions what influenced the shape and texture of the sensation novel, and what its repercussions were both in the nineteenth century and up to the present day.

This is a study of high and low culture in the years before the Reform Act of 1867, which vastly increased the number of voters in Victorian Britain. As many commentators worried about the political consequences of this 'Leap in the Dark', authors and artists began to re-evaluate their own role in a democratic society that was also becoming more urban and more anonymous. While some fantasized about ways of capturing and holding the attention of the masses, others preferred to make art and literature more exclusive, to shut out the crowd. One path led to 'Sensation'; the other to aestheticism, though there were also efforts to evade this opposition. This book examines the fiction, drama, fine art, and ephemeral forms of these years against the backdrop of Reform. Authors and artists studied include Wilkie Collins, Dion Boucicault, Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, and the popular illustrator, Alfred Concanen.

Product Description: (Her novels were)...brilliant, lively, ingenious and destitute of a single ray of sentiment. Henry James on M.E.Braddon This scholarly monograph offers new research on Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1916) who wrote over eighty novels and rivaled Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins in popularity in mid and late Victorian times...read more

Product Description: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, one of the most prolific authors of the Victorian period, remains best known for her sensation fiction, but over the course of a long career contributed to a multitude of literary genres, working as a journalist, short story writer and editor, as well as authoring more than eighty novels...read more

Product Description: This comprehensive collection offers a complete introduction to one of the most popular literary forms of the Victorian period, its key authors and works, its major themes, and its lasting legacy. Places key authors and novels in their cultural and historical context Includes studies of major topics such as race, gender, melodrama, theatre, poetry, realism in fiction, and connections to other art forms Contributions from top international scholars approach an important literary genre from a range of perspectives Offers both a pre and post-history of the genre to situate it in the larger tradition of Victorian publishing and literature Incorporates coverage of traditional research and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship...read more

Product Description: A fully revised edition of The Sensation Novel taking account of wider interest in, and critical coverage of, this important and popular genre. First published in 1994, Lyn Pykett's The Sensation Novel from 'The Woman in White' to 'The Moonstone' charted the re-emergence into critical view of a nineteenth-century fictional genre which had, in its own day, enjoyed immense popular success and given rise to heated critical and moral debates...read more

Product Description: The first full-length study of sensationalist and melodramatic elements in Hardy's novels uses six of his texts to demonstrate the ways in which Hardy uses the melodramatic mode to advance his critique of established Victorian cultural beliefs through the employment of non-realistic plot devices and sensational 'excess...read more

Product Description: This fascinating new book offers a detailed account of the prolific debate about the sensation novel and considers the genre's dialogues with a number of sciences. Well-known and obscure sensation novels are read against this context in order to recover the forgotten history of sensual reading the genre inspired...read more

Product Description: This book recovers the fiction of Charles Reade, who was among the best-known authors of the sensation fiction of the 1860s, as a body of work that anticipates recent trends in literary and cultural theory.

Product Description: This book takes a look at the evolution of crime fiction. Considering 'criminography' as a system of inter-related sub-genres, it explores the connections between modes of literature such as revenge tragedies, the gothic and anarchist fiction, while taking into account the influence of pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism and criminal anthropology...read more

Product Description: A concise and lucid overview of the key criticism -- from early reviews to twenty-first commentaries -- surrounding the popular genre of Victorian "sensation" fiction.

Product Description: Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification...read more

Product Description: From Sensation to Society tracks the evolution of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's critique of Victorian marriage in the early phase of her long and prolific novel-writing career. The study begins with Braddon's two famous sensational novels, Lady Audley's Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863); it ends with her first novel of 'society,' The Lady's Mile (1865)...read more

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Product Description: Victorian sensation novels, with their compulsive plots of crime, transgression and mystery, were bestsellers. Deborah Wynne analyses the fascinating relationships between sensation novels and the magazines in which they were serialized...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This selection of eleven essays charts the most important aspects of the developing debate about Wilkie Collins' fiction in the last twenty years. Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches--including reader response theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural materialism and a range of feminisms--these essays examine Collins' fiction from several perspectives: historical, psychological, structural, generic and political (including gender politics). They focus on an author preoccupied with the production of social and psychological identity, and with issues of class, gender and power. If there is a single issue which permeates this collection, it is the question of the subversiveness of Collins' fiction or, alternatively, its retreat from and/or containment of a radical social critique or subversive impulses. The pros and cons of this debate are explored further in Lyn Pykett's detailed and wide-ranging introduction.

Gathered together for the first time in this volume, these influential articles by distinguished Alcott scholar Madeleine Stern illuminate Louisa May Alcott's development as an individual and a writer, revealign a surprisingly complex personality. The essays trace her growing professionalism, uncover her feminist and abolitionist convictions, and discuss the discoveries that unmasked her double literary life. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Focusing on the works of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood and Rhoda Broughton, Professor Lynn Pykett uses feminist literary history and theory and a cultural studies approach to show how the developments of the last twenty years or so have enabled the sensation novel of the 1860s to be re-viewed as a genre...read more