Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:56:58.115Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Mark Knight
Mark Knight*
Affiliation:
Roehampton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

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.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 323 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Ablow, Rachel. The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Bachman, Maria K., and Cox, Don Richard, eds. Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003.Google Scholar
Baker, William, Gasson, Andrew, Law, Graham and Lewis, Paul, eds. The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters. 4 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005.Google Scholar
Brantlinger, Patrick. “What is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?”. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37.1 (1982): 1–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chavez, Julia M. “Wandering Readers and the Pedagogical Potential of Temple Bar.” Victorian Periodicals Review 40.2 (2007): 126–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cvetkovich, Ann. Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Daly, Nicholas. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Diamond, Michael. Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Anthem, 2003.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Page, Norman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Pamela. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women's Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrison, Kimberly, and Fantina, Richard, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Jones, Anna Maria. Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorises the Sensation Self. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Joyce, Simon. Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.Google Scholar
Knight, Mark, and Mason, Emma. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003.Google Scholar
Law, Graham. Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.Google Scholar
Law, Graham, and Maunder, Andrew. Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mangham, Andrew. Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mangham, Andrew, ed. Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007.Google Scholar
Mansel, Henry. “Sensation Novels.” Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863): 481–514.Google Scholar
Maunder, Andrew, gen ed. Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction. 6 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2004.Google Scholar
Maunder, Andrew, and Moore, Grace, eds. Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.Google Scholar
McKelvy, William. “The Woman in White and Graphic Sex.” Victorian Literature and Culture 35.1 (2007): 287–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D. A.The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, Maureen. Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Nayder, Lillian. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Oliphant, Margaret. The Victorian Age of English Literature. Vol. 2. London: Percival, 1892.Google Scholar
O'Malley, Patrick R. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ouida. Moths. Ed. Schroeder, Natalie. Ontario: Broadview, 2005.Google Scholar
Phegley, Jennifer. “Domesticating the Sensation Novelists: Ellen Price Wood as Author and Editor of the Argosy Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review 38.2 (2005): 180–98.Google Scholar
Pittard, Christopher. “‘Cheap Healthful Literature’: The Strand Magazine, Fictions of Crime, and Purified Reading Communities.” Victorian Periodicals Review 40.1 (2007): 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pykett, Lyn. The Improper Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. London: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Reitz, Caroline. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Schroeder, Natalie, and Schroeder, Ronald A.. From Sensation to Society: Representations of Marriage in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862–1866. Delaware: U of Delaware P, 2006.Google Scholar
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence. Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jenny Bourne, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Jenny Bourne. In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. London: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Walker, Pamela J. Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2001.Google Scholar
Worthington, Heather. The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wynne, Deborah. The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Clever Woman of the Family. Ed. Simmons, Clare. Ontario: Broadview, 2001.Google Scholar