Content tagged: sensation fiction

A Companion to Sensation Fiction

A collection of essays on Victorian sensation fiction should be, like the genre itself, an entertaining read, and Pamela K. Gilbert’s A Companion to Sensation Fiction does not disappoint, proving to be a fascinating and scholarly collection of essays. The volume forms part of the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series, the subjects of which include crime fiction, […]

Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses

The aim of Laurie Garrison’s book, entitled Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels: Pleasures of the Senses is to help fill a critical void in the study of sensation novels, in particular as regards the cultural context in which these novels were generated. Whereas in the past critics focused their attention mainly on questions of gender and psychology […]

The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine

Deborah Wynne is concerned with both the material production of fiction and the experience of reading. In this informative study of the sensation novel in the 1860s, she reminds us that these two things are closely inter-related, and in ways which make our reading of Victorian novels quite different from the ways in which they […]

The White Phantom

In his essay on “The Unknown Public” in Household Words in August 1858, Wilkie Collins assumed a great gulf fixed between the middle-class literary audience (“the subscribers to this journal, the customers at publishing houses, the members of book-clubs and circulating libraries, and the purchasers and borrowers of newspapers and reviews …”) and the huddled mass of […]