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

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.

Signs of Decline? Prostheses and the Ageing Subject

This chapter reveals that the cultural association of cosmetic prostheses with ageing stems, at least in part, from satirical sources that paradoxically both bulwark and mock the hegemony of physical wholeness and youth. Emphasizing the extent to which preferences for youth were intertwined with demands for physical completeness, this chapter exposes how the dominance of these two physical states was undermined by stories that either ridicule the process of concealment for elderly users or present unlikely prostheticized heroes in unconventional ways. The chapter draws from genres such as the Gothic, sensation fiction, and imperial adventure fiction. It argues that, despite their differences, the depictions of ageing prosthesis users selected challenge the dominance of physical wholeness/youth by laughing at the absurd results that these demands effected.

Playing Cute: Sensation Villainy and the Aesthetics of Small Things in The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret

In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai defines ‘cute’ as an aesthetic ‘preoccupation with small, easy to handle things . . . an aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and the vulnerable’. Although Ngai identifies the cute as a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon, and one which is inextricably bound up with the mass-market commodification, even eroticization and fetishization of the cute object or person, it is difficult to imagine a literary character more enamoured with ‘small things’ – from tiny, sugary confections to his menagerie of pet mice – than Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, or a character who so perfectly conforms to the definition of the cute commodity itself as ‘appealing specifically . . . for protection and care’ than the ‘childish, helpless, babyfied’ Lucy Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). This article reads Count Fosco and Lady Audley through the characteristics of cuteness to better understand the aesthetic and economic dynamics of their villainy, and to establish for the twentieth-century phenomenon of cuteness identified by Ngai a discernible genealogy in the specific conjunction of print culture, theatricality, commodification, and physical sensation that we now recognize as the sensation fiction of the 1860s.

Review of Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction by Heidi Logan

No abstract available.

The Detective and Sensation Fiction of Wilkie Collins: A Computational Lexical-Semantic Analysis

Theme and genre classifications in the works of Wilkie Collins (1824-89) have been extensively investigated using different literary approaches; these are usually based on textual content and biographical considerations. Different critics place Collins’ works under the two main headings of detective fiction and sensation fiction. Such analyses have been generated by what is referred to as the ‘philological method’; that is, by an individual critic’s reading of the relevant material and their intuitive abstraction of generalizations from that reading. A problem with such an approach is that it is not objective, and it is therefore unreliable. The research question is thus asked in response to the subjectivity of previous genre classifications of the novels of Wilkie Collins and the lack of agreement among literary critics and researchers about such classifications. As such, I ask whether an objective and conceptually useful reading of the themes and subjects of Wilkie Collins’ prose fiction texts can be developed. As thus, computational lexical-semantics is suggested to understand the issues of thematic classification. For this purpose, vector space clustering (VSC) was used for capturing the lexical-semantic features of his novels and linking them explicitly to the relevant themes and genres. It is suggested that through this method, an objective, replicable, and reliable genre classification of Collins’ novels is possible. The results of this study can serve as a basis for future studies and criticisms of Wilkie Collins’ fiction.