Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre

by Kimberly Harrison, Richard Fantina

Harrison (English, Florida International U.) and Fantina (English, U. of Miami, Coral Gables) present twenty essays introducing and exploring Victorian sensation fiction-- as well as challenging its widely accepted "subgenre" status. Contributors aim to explain the popularity of novels featuring sexual scandal, murder, drug abuse, and bigamy in morally chaste Victorian England, illuminating how critics of the day demonized authors like Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Other chapters discuss the sensation novel's treatment of corporeality, sexuality, gender, class, race, and culture; and show how Dickens and other major Victorian authors treaded into and were influenced by the sensation genre. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Genres: Nonfiction, Academic, Victorian, Literary Criticism

278 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2006

Reviews

[Fran]

The arguments presented in this book vary greatly in quality, and if you're very detail-oriented when it comes to some of the works mentioned, you may find yourself strongly disagreeing with some of the conclusions that are reached in particular essays. This being said, even the essays where the main argument is flawed are valuable for their supporting arguments, and I've found plenty of quotable material that I plan on referring back to in my own writing, if only to use it as a counterargument. The shining strength of these essays is their brevity. Pretty much every one is between 10 and 11 pages. This means that even for the poorly argued ones, you'll never find yourself truly feeling like you've lost an inordinate amount of time reading them. Frankly I wouldn't complain if all scholarly essays were around that length.