1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910855392803321

Autore

Green James Aaron

Titolo

Sensation Fiction and Modernity : The Meanings of Ambivalence in Mid-Victorian Britain / / by James Aaron Green

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2024

ISBN

9783031498343

Edizione

[1st ed. 2024.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (235 pages)

Disciplina

823.8093

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 19th century

European literature

Nineteenth-Century Literature

European Literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

1: Introduction -- 2: ‘Straight through those clear blue eyes into his soul’: dreams of transparency in mary elizabeth braddon’s the trail of the serpent (1860) -- 3: ‘The curse that has always followed us’: (dis)inheriting the past in joseph sheridan le fanu’s wylder’s hand (1864) -- 4: ‘Short-spanned living creatures’: evolutionary perspectives and the fate of progress in rhoda broughton’s not wisely, but too well (1867) -- 5: ‘Can I say I believe in it too?’: hesitation and the difficulties of decision in wilkie collins’s armadale (1866) -- 6: Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

This book re-reads the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and modernity. Whereas critics have long recognized its appearance in the form of nervous subjects and technologically-enabled mobility, Green contends that sensation fiction also depicts modernity in the form of intellectual and moral discontinuity. Through closely historicist readings of novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Rhoda Broughton, this book traces how discontinuity is manifested in the suspenseful plotting of these fictions, through which readers are challenged to revise conventional assumptions about the world and adopt more contingent perspectives. The study demonstrates that reading for this sense of modernity does not merely uncover the



genre's engagements with various mid-century contexts. More fundamentally, it broaches a new sense of the function and significance of sensation fiction: the acclimatization of its readers to the discontinuities of modern existence.