FIGURING OUT THE FASCINATION: RECENT TRENDS IN CRITICISM ON VICTORIAN SENSATION AND CRIME FICTION

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 323-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Knight
Keyword(s):  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
British Fiction ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
A Minor

Over the last thirty years or so, sensation fiction has shaken off its scandalous roots to become a respectable area of academic study. The transformation began with the publication of Winifred Hughes's The Maniac in the Cellar (1980) and Patrick Brantlinger's “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” (1982), and gathered pace in the 1980s and 90s through the contributions of Ann Cvetkovich, Pamela Gilbert, D. A. Miller, Lyn Pykett, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. One of the results of all this scholarly interest is that the genre has begun to attract more introductory works that concentrate on consolidating what others have said. Ideas that were once considered new or controversial are now seen as common knowledge: we know that sensation fiction involves more than the influential novels written in the 1860s by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins; we are familiar with the frequent blurring between sensation fiction and other genres (including crime fiction and the gothic); we are well schooled in interdisciplinary approaches that read sensation fiction alongside science, psychology, and law; and we are used to competing claims for sensation fiction as a subversive or conservative genre. With so much attention being given to a collection of writings once described by Hughes as “irretrievably minor” (167) and by Brantlinger as “a minor subgenre of British fiction” (1), one could be forgiven for thinking that there are few secrets left to be uncovered. Yet, as the wide array of books considered here attests, the critical appeal of sensation fiction and Victorian crime shows no sign of abating. If anything, the first few years of the twenty-first century have seen even greater levels of interest: a number of Victorian Studies conferences have chosen sensation as their theme, and the genre features regularly in the pages of academic journals. Given that the extent of our ongoing fascination would probably have shocked a previous generation of scholars, this review of recent critical trends will try and figure out why the genre possesses such a powerful hold on our thinking and whether or not this hold is likely to continue.

Reading Old Books

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mack
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o ◽  
First Century ◽  
Creative Power ◽  
Urban Deprivation ◽  
A Minor ◽  
International Character

In literary and cultural studies, “tradition” is a word everyone uses but few address critically. In this book, the author offers a wide-ranging exploration of the creative power of literary tradition, from the middle ages to the twenty-first century, revealing in new ways how it helps writers and readers make new works and meanings. The book argues that the best way to understand tradition is by examining the moments when a writer takes up an old text and writes something new out of a dialogue with that text and the promptings of the present situation. The book examines Petrarch as a user, instigator, and victim of tradition. It shows how Chaucer became the first great English writer by translating and adapting a minor poem by Boccaccio. It investigates how Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser made new epic meanings by playing with assumptions, episodes, and phrases translated from their predecessors. It then analyzes how the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell drew on tradition to address the new problem of urban deprivation in Mary Barton. And, finally, it looks at how the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, in his 2004 novel Wizard of the Crow, reflects on biblical, English literary, and African traditions. Drawing on key theorists, critics, historians, and sociologists, and stressing the international character of literary tradition, the book illuminates the not entirely free choices readers and writers make to create meaning in collaboration and competition with their models.

NEO-VICTORIAN STUDIES

2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 339-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
Remarkable Effect

Long ago, Margery Williams'sThe Velveteen Rabbit(1922) taught us that toys become real when they are loved. Literary genres, however, become real when they are parodied. The neo-Victorian novel, therefore, must now be real, for its features have become so familiar and readily distinguishable that John Crace has been able to have naughty fun at their expense inBrideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century(2010), where John Fowles'sThe French Lieutenant's Woman(1969) stands as representative of the type. Crace's treatment of Fowles's first-person narrator results in a remarkable effect: the ironic commentary upon the nineteenth century from a twentieth-century vantage point that runs throughout the novel gets subjected, in turn, to ironic commentary from a twenty-first-century point-of-view:

scholarly journals Collective thought-action: On lecture performances, transmedia knowledge and designing possible worlds

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-340
Author(s):  
Jon McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
First Century ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Republic

The election of Donald Trump has exposed a politics of resentment dividing rural and urban populations, as well as communities and colleges. This division stretches back to Plato's Academy. When Plato threw the poets out of the Republic, he banished practices such as poetry, music, and dance from the realm of true, epistemic knowledge, which he opposed to doxa or common knowledge. Centuries later, this opposition would shape European colonialism's approach to indigenous life worlds, whose "primitive" rituals, myths, and fetishes would confront the "civilized" methods, histories, and objects of Western knowledge. These same oppositions structure ideological critiques of popular culture. However, the emergence of lecture performances, theory rap, and info comics within twenty-first century research universities suggests that traditional knowledge production is under stress inside and outside the academy. Emerging is a transmedia knowledge that engages different audiences by mixing episteme and doxa. At stake here: the role of aesthetics in post-disciplinary societies of control and in resistant modes of collective thought-action. Across both the arts and sciences, scholars worldwide are turning to transmedia knowledge not simply for communication but also for co-creation of research. Here transmedia knowledge can function as civic discourse and as a conduit of a generalized aesthetics.

The Moonstone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilkie Collins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Country House ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Moonstone

‘Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer?’ A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves. One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

‘Hard-Boiled’ Detectives in Spain and Mexico: The Ethical Reorientation of a Genre

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-170
Author(s):  
Deborah Cafiero
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Manuel Vazquez Montalban ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethical Stance ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
History Of Place

Hard-boiled’ fiction arose in the early decades of the twentieth century, uncovering connections among crime, wealth and power, and exposing moral fissures within U.S. capitalism. After French publisher Gallimard marketed translations of American crime fiction as noir, international writers started adjusting the ethical framework of the original authors as part of their ‘glocal’ adaptation of a global genre to local circumstances. The present article pushes past ‘glocal’ analysis of noir to propose a ‘transnational’ relationship, adapting Paul Giles’ definition of ‘transnational’ practice in which international authors reflect the genre back upon its American roots in order to illuminate the ‘silences, absences and blindspots’ in the original ethical stance. The ‘misreading’ of noir also permits a ‘misrecognition’ of local circumstances, exposing moral fissures throughout different societies. This article shows how series by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Paco Ignacio Taibo II reveal ethical blindspots in American models by situating the detective within an emotional history of place (Barcelona for Vázquez Montalbán, Mexico City for Taibo II). Although these detectives ultimately cannot determine or perform the role of ethical citizen, their emotional-geographical bonds open up a critique of American ideals and pave the way for a reimagining of the ethical in the twenty-first century.

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