Download or read book Narrative Affect and Victorian Sensation written by Tara MacDonald and published by EUP. This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Positions the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century popular fiction more generally, as vital to the history of feeling

Download or read book Victorian Sensation Fiction written by Jessica Cox and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.

Download or read book Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers written by Anne-Marie Beller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholarly understanding of the Victorian literary field has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre’s importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. Yet until very recently, work on sensationalism has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention. This collection examines the fiction of ten women sensation writers who were immensely popular in the Victorian period but remain critically neglected today – writers such as Annie Edwardes, M.C. Houstoun, Annie French, Dora Russell and others. The Victorian sensation novel was categorically associated with women by Victorian reviewers and this collection extends our current understanding of this sub-genre by showing that female sensation writers were often sophisticated in their textual strategies, employing a range of metafictional techniques and narrative innovations. By moving beyond the novelists who have come to represent the genre, this book presents a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that constructed the concept of ‘sensationalism’ for Victorian readers and critics. The book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

Download or read book Conspicuous Silences written by Ruth Rosaler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? Conspicuous Silences answers these questions by examining Victorian novels in which pivotal events are left inexplicit for hundreds of pages at a time, but are nonetheless evident to the reader. The clarity with which readers understand these inexplicit plot lines is evidenced by their ability to follow the progression of narratives that rely heavily on the inexplicit content being detected; without this reader comprehension, these narratives would be deemed incoherent. In linguistics, communications that depend on a hearer's or reader's inference, rather on their "decoding" the explicit content of an utterance, are termed "implicatures." Conspicuous Silences explores the impact that central, sustained implicatures have on a reader's experience of a novel. It also discusses how authors may generate those implicatures by exploiting the reader's assumption of narratorial omniscience, and the correlated reader assumption of a narrative's fictionality. Reliance on such sustained, fictionality-related implicatures is fairly ubiquitous: Conspicuous Silences concentrates on texts by Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and M. E. Braddon. It examines the use of implicature in communicating impolite topics, communicating character psychology, and in fashioning a playful narrative tone. This work contributes to Victorian literary scholarship, narratological discussions about narratorial omniscience and fictionality, and pragmatic stylistic debates about fictionality and the use of implicature.

Download or read book Feeling Clumsy Feeling Alien written by Gracie M. Bain and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Feeling Clumsy, Feeling Alien: Gender and Affect in Victorian Sensation Fiction" explores the interactions between the shock of reading sensation fiction and the affective potential of the genre using Sara Ahmed's definition of the killjoy and the affect alien. The sensation genre, as explained in its name, is potentially useful when thinking about affective ties in the Victorian period. The first chapter, "Tracing Sensations: Finding and Following the Killjoy" explores the affective footwork that readers of sensation fiction are asked to perform in their sympathetic process with the female villains and fallen heroines. Affective tools employed by sensational fiction create an understanding between the reader and the villains that occupied most of sensation fiction. The second chapter, "The Fallen Heroine: Feeling Injustice" discusses a sensational villain that perhaps more easily encourages sympathy: Ellen Wood's Lady Isabel Vane turned Lady Carlyle in East Lynne. Chapter three, "The Villain: Feeling for the Enemy," questions the easily defined femme fatale category of sensation novels and argues that Lady Audley's actions in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret can be attributed to her role as someone that affects the wrong way. Readers cannot entirely sympathize with Lady Audley or Isabel Vane, but they can recognize themselves within the frustrations and extenuating circumstances that create an environment in which the character feels the only course of action is seduction or murder. The affective possibility of Lady Audley and Isabel Vane relies on the proximity of the reader to the character's situations. To navigate affect is to navigate affective orientation and proximity, and sensation fiction provides the opportunity for disorientation and inappropriate proximity.

Download or read book In the Secret Theatre of Home Wilkie Collins Sensation Narrative and Nineteenth Century Psychology written by Jenny Bourne Taylor and published by Victorian Secrets. This book was released on with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 1852 novel Basil, Wilkie Collins' narrator concludes that "those ghastly heart-tragedies laid open before me ... are not to be written, but ... are acted and reacted, scene by scene, year by year, in the secret theatre of home." Taking this memorable quote as her starting point, Jenny Bourne Taylor demonstrates how Victorian psychology is central to an understanding of the complexity and vitality of Collins' fiction, exploring the boundaries of mind/body, sanity/madness, and consciousness/unconsciousness. Taylor's depth of research and thoughtful analysis establishes the importance of Collins as a writer whose fiction challenges the cultural constructions of the nineteenth century, and proves "the impossibility of drawing a precise boundary between fictional and psychological codes". Going beyond conventional discussion of the sensation genre, here we see the depth and range of Collins' writing and gain an understanding of its relation to Victorian medical thought. The study includes close readings of five novels: Basil (1852), The Woman in White (1859-60), No Name (1862-3), Armadale (1864-66), and The Moonstone (1868). Consideration is also given to Man and Wife (1870), The New Magdalen (1872), The Law and the Lady (1875), Jezebel's Daughter (1879), Heart and Science (1882-3), The Fallen Leaves (1879), and The Legacy of Cain (1889). CONTENTS Foreword by Andrew Mangham Introduction - Collins as a sensation novelist Chapter 1 - The psychic and the social: Boundaries of identity in nineteenth-century psychology Chapter 2 - Nervous fancies of hypochondriacal bachelors - Basil, and the problems of modern life Chapter 3 - The Woman in White - Resemblance and difference - patience and resolution Chapter 4 - Skins to jump into - Femininity as masquerade in No Name Chapter 5 - Armadale - The sensitive subject as palimpsest Chapter 6 - Lost parcel or hidden soul? Detecting the unconscious in The Moonstone Chapter 7 - Resistless influences - Degeneration and its negation in the later fiction

Download or read book Neo Victorianism and Sensation Fiction written by Jessica Cox and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book represents the first full-length study of the relationship between neo-Victorianism and nineteenth-century sensation fiction. It examines the diverse and multiple legacies of Victorian popular fiction by authors such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, tracing their influence on a range of genres and works, including detective fiction, YA writing, Gothic literature, and stage and screen adaptations. In doing so, it forces a reappraisal of critical understandings of neo-Victorianism in terms of its origins and meanings, as well as offering an important critical intervention in popular fiction studies. The work traces the afterlife of Victorian sensation fiction, taking in the neo-Gothic writing of Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt, contemporary popular historical detective and YA fiction by authors including Elizabeth Peters and Philip Pullman, and the literary fiction of writers such as Joanne Harris and Charles Palliser. The work will appeal to scholars and students of Victorian fiction, neo-Victorianism, and popular culture alike.

Download or read book Victorian Sensation Fiction written by Andrew Radford and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-12-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise and lucid overview of the key criticism -- from early reviews to twenty-first commentaries -- surrounding the popular genre of Victorian "sensation" fiction.

Download or read book Creating character written by Helena Ifill and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about personality formation and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others. Innovative readings of seven sensation novels explore how they employ and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, inherent constitution, education, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors. Drawing on material ranging from medical textbooks, to sociological treatises, to popular periodicals, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified.

Download or read book Serial Feelings written by William Lee Hughes and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the relationship between serialized narratives and discourses of feeling and emotion in the nineteenth century. I argue that feeling and emotion must be understood in historical and discursive terms, rather than simply in terms of biology and cognition. Furthermore, the form in which these discourses are mediated shapes them as well. The advent of popular serial fiction at the beginning of the Victorian period had profound effects on these discourses at a pivotal moment in capitalist modernity. Analyzing the way in which serial fiction gives form to discourses of feeling complicates our understanding of what it means to experience a feeling or emotion, particularly feelings which are thought to be natural and unchanging throughout history. The introduction provides background analyses of the historical context for my argument, outlining the rise of serial narratives from the late 18th century, through Dickens and the serialization of the Victorian novel to the use of serial forms in early 20th century film. Here, I also explain my use of Lacanian register theory and Raymond Williams’s theory of “structures of feeling” to intervene in critical discussions of affect. Under this framework, I describe any given structure of feeling in terms of three registers: feeling (imaginary), emotion (symbolic) and affect (real). Feeling is the part of the structure that one imagines can be contained in an individual subject while emotion is that part of the structure that is symbolically fungible and intersubjective; both should be understood in historically specific terms. In contrast, real affect, the core of the structure that resists being imagined or symbolized, is the transhistorical kernel or remainder whose resistance to being imagined or symbolized constitutes the conditions under which historically specific emotions and feelings are elaborated. In our current moment the cognitive appraisal model of emotion obtains, but this model can only account for affect as an individual, ahistorical phenomenon. Under the cognitive appraisal model, an individual assesses and evaluates a situation accompanied by physiological arousal in order to produce an emotional state. In contrast, I argue that serial media forms demonstrate the mediation that is necessary for feeling to be felt as such. A subject’s affective response is never individual; in order to be knowable, real affect must be relayed through an other, even if this other is imagined. In addition to individual feeling, structures of feeling should be understood to also include symbolic emotion, which is determined by historically specific discourses, and real affect, which is that part of the structure whose inability to be directly represented serves as the motor for the elaboration of both emotion and feeling over time. Crucially, real affect is nonrelational and impersonal; it both forms and deforms the emotions and feelings that serve as the infrastructure of relationality. To demonstrate how this affective dynamic plays out historically, I frame each chapter as a case study of a Victorian text. The first chapter analyzes the woodcut images in Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop to argue against the prevailing notion that grief in the nineteenth century was a productive, social activity. Instead, I demonstrate that grief is an obstacle to social relationality. This is evident in its figuration as a stasis of time that arrests temporal progress; in serial fiction, grief turns out to be impersonal and nonrelational. While we are generally accustomed to thinking that anxiety is always already ordinary, the second chapter of my dissertation argues that this ordinariness has a history that is rooted in the mediation of the term “anxiety” in Victorian serial fiction. The older term, “anguish” comes to be replaced by “anxiety” and the serial repetition of the latter term modulates it such that ordinary anxiety becomes the most familiar and quotidian affect of capitalist modernity. The final chapter focuses on Joseph Conrad’s serial publication of Lord Jim and the discourse of “exhaustion,” which mediates affective relations between the main characters in the narrative. At the end of the nineteenth century, exhaustion emerges as a reified emotion and an epistemological category, such that knowledge of one’s affect can only be acquired once that affect has been mediated by exhaustion. The dissertation ends with a coda on early twentieth-century serial film, using The Hazards of Helen as its case study and exploring the relationship between serial form and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “affection-image,” the interval that establishes a qualitative relation between perception and action.

Download or read book Sensation Fiction and Modernity written by James Aaron Green and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Neo Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative written by L. Hadley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-13 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Placing the popular genre of neo-Victorian fiction within the context of the contemporary cultural fascination with the Victorians, this book argues that these novels are distinguished by a commitment to historical specificity and understands them within their contemporary context and the context of Victorian historical and literary narratives.

Download or read book Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel written by Jessica R. Valdez and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions.

Download or read book A Companion to Sensation Fiction written by Pamela K. Gilbert and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection offers a complete introduction to one of the most popular literary forms of the Victorian period, its key authors and works, its major themes, and its lasting legacy. Places key authors and novels in their cultural and historical context Includes studies of major topics such as race, gender, melodrama, theatre, poetry, realism in fiction, and connections to other art forms Contributions from top international scholars approach an important literary genre from a range of perspectives Offers both a pre and post-history of the genre to situate it in the larger tradition of Victorian publishing and literature Incorporates coverage of traditional research and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship

Download or read book Dickens Reade and Collins Sensation Novelists written by Walter Clarke Phillips and published by Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature. This book was released on 1919 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies the shift in the theory of novel writing from a focus on biography and esthetics to narrative fiction during the Victorian era as the audience of the novel widened from the educated elite to the common person.

Download or read book Victorian Sensations written by Kimberly Harrison and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification. Comprehensive in scope, this collection includes twenty original essays employing various critical approaches to cover a range of topics that will interest many readers." "Essays are organized thematically into three sections: issues of genre; sensational representations of gender and sexuality; and the texts' complex readings of diverse social and cultural phenomena such as class, race, and empire. The introduction reviews the critical reception of sensation fiction to situate these new essays within a larger scholarly context."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Sensational Deviance written by Heidi Logan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction investigates the representation of disability in fictional works by the leading Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, exploring how disability acts as a major element in the shaping of the sensation novel genre and how various sensation novels respond to traditional viewpoints of disability and to new developments in physiological and psychiatric knowledge. The depictions of disabled characters in sensation fiction frequently deviate strongly from typical depictions of disability in mainstream Victorian literature, undermining its stigmatized positioning as tragic deficit, severe limitation, or pathology. Close readings of nine individual novels situate their investigations of physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities against the period’s disability discourses and interest in senses, perception, stimuli, the nervous system, and the hereditability of impairments. The importance of moral insanity and degeneration theory within sensation fiction connect the genre with criminal anthropology, suggesting the genre’s further significance in the light of the later emergence of eugenics, psychoanalysis, and genetics.