Sensation Fiction and Modernity

This book re-reads the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and modernity. Whereas critics have long recognized its appearance in the form of nervous subjects and technologically-enabled mobility, Green contends that sensation fiction also depicts modernity in the form of intellectual and moral discontinuity. Through closely historicist readings of novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Rhoda Broughton, this book traces how discontinuity is manifested in the suspenseful plotting of these fictions, through which readers are challenged to revise conventional assumptions about the world and adopt more contingent perspectives. The study demonstrates that reading for this sense of modernity does not merely uncover the genre's engagements with various mid-century contexts. More fundamentally, it broaches a new sense of the function and significance of sensation fiction: the acclimatization of its readers to the discontinuities of modern existence.

First book-length study of the relations between sensation fiction and modernity First study of any kind to assess the genre against a so called 'cultural discontinuity' sense of modernity Broadens our understanding of the range of texts considered to express modernity

Autorentext

James Aaron Green is a postdoctoral research fellow (ÖAW APART-GSK) at the University of Vienna, Austria, specializing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular fiction. His work is published in Gothic Studies, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Wilkie Collins in Context (2023) and is due to appear in Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (2024). His recent work in literary age and aging studies is forthcoming in the book Fictions of Radical Life Extension: Living Forever from the Fin de Siècle to the First World War.

Inhalt

1: Introduction.- 2: 'Straight through those clear blue eyes into his soul': dreams of transparency in mary elizabeth braddon's the trail of the serpent (1860).- 3: 'The curse that has always followed us': (dis)inheriting the past in joseph sheridan le fanu's wylder's hand (1864).- 4: 'Short-spanned living creatures': evolutionary perspectives and the fate of progress in rhoda broughton's not wisely, but too well (1867).- 5: 'Can I say I believe in it too?': hesitation and the difficulties of decision in wilkie collins's armadale (1866).- 6: Conclusion.