scholarly journals “Afterlives” of Victorian Sensation Novel. Review on: Jessica Cox. Neo-Victorianism and Sensation Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 251 p.

The New Past ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 316-322
Author(s):  
Ekaterina A. Martynenko
Keyword(s):  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Sensation Novel

“The Subject Escapes Me”: Spellbinding Lecturers and (In-)Attentive Audiences in Late-Victorian Serialized Sensation Fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Julia Zwierlein
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Mass Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sensation Novel

AbstractThis essay investigates the late-Victorian competition between oral and print mass cultures by focusing on the example of the popular lecture. It situates fictional lecturing scenes in the historical contexts of increased literacy rates and the explosion of mass print culture as well as elitist fears about political inclusiveness after the 1867 Reform Act. My lecturing scenes are taken from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel

Transimperial Negotiations and Cultural Anxieties from the Sensation Novel to the Adventure Story

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Robert McParland ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Sensation Fiction ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Adventure Story ◽  
Cultural Measures ◽  
Cultural Anxieties ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Sensation Novels ◽  
Woman In White ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret

The sensation novels of the 1860s expressed the anxieties of the age, challenged realism, and sought to revive wonder. Within the transformations of modernity, these novels were read and exchanged across the British Empire. Sensation fiction mixed romance and realism and its sensational elements reflected modern tensions and concerns. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret probed the sources of violence, the cultural measures of sanity, and underscored the transgressions of an oppressed female figure in her search for freedom. Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White likewise challenged cultural certainties, as he observed the expanding popular reading audience. The rise of the adventure story within the imperial designs of colonization expressed a sense of mystery and an encounter with otherness that is interrogated here.

Lady Audley’s Secret

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Good Friend ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
Lady Audley's Secret ◽  
Conventional Picture

It only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court.’ When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley’s past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael’s nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert’s darkest suspicions really be true? Lady Audley’s Secret was an immediate bestseller, and readers have enjoyed its thrilling plot ever since its first publication in 1862. This new edition explores Braddon’s portrait of her scheming heroine in the context of the nineteenth-century sensation novel and the lively, often hostile debates it provoked.

The Nineteenth-Century Sensation Novel by Lyn Pykett

2013 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-208
Author(s):  
Max Fincher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sensation Novel

The Lighting Design of Hardy's Novels

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75
Author(s):  
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Lighting Design ◽  
Realist Novels ◽  
Sensation Novel ◽  
The City ◽  
Jude The Obscure

This essay argues that the phenomenology of light in Thomas Hardy's novels affords a key to his representation of subjectivity. The lighting of most scenes in nineteenth-century fiction is never specified. But from the spectacular lighting effects of Hardy's early sensation novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), to the futile quest for the "City of Light" in Jude the Obscure (1895) and the burned-out pyrotechnics of his last narrative, The Well-Beloved (1897), the light of Hardy's fiction is marked in a double sense——both described in detail and registered as exceptional. Rather than a figure for enlightenment, as in the realist novels of George Eliot and others, Hardy's light is the medium of subjectivity, and it characteristically occludes and distorts as much as it illuminates. Like the painter J.M.W. Turner, whose art the novelist excitedly recognized as an analogue of his own, Hardy represents light not as an absence to be looked through but as something to be looked at and closely observed in all its varieties.

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