Sensation Fiction and Modernity (eBook)

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.

James Aaron Green is a postdoctoral research fellow (ÖAW APART-GSK) at the University of Vienna, Austria, specializing in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular fiction. His work is published in Gothic Studies, the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Wilkie Collins in Context (2023) and is due to appear in Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (2024). His recent work in literary age and aging studies is forthcoming in the book Fictions of Radical Life Extension: Living Forever from the Fin de Siècle to the First World War.