Beth Palmer
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199599110
- eISBN:
- 9780191725371
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199599110.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth ...
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This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship. The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialization in the periodical press was not just complexly reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they could transfer outwards into other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptional control over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination. By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century to explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the new woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.Less
This book explores the ways in which women writers utilized the powerful position of author-editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship. The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialization in the periodical press was not just complexly reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they could transfer outwards into other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptional control over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination. By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century to explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the new woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.
Kate Flint
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121855
- eISBN:
- 9780191671357
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121855.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter deals with the phenomenon of sensation fiction in the 1860s: fiction which deliberately catered to compulsive forms of consumption, ...
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This chapter deals with the phenomenon of sensation fiction in the 1860s: fiction which deliberately catered to compulsive forms of consumption, and which the reviewers presented as being devoured by women. The sensation fiction’s frames of reference are drawn from familiar supppositions about woman’s affective susceptibility. Above all, the presence of sexual desire and sexual energy within the fictions was singled out. This disruptive potential was greeted with particular anxiety when it was located in novels written by women, notably Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Mrs Henry Wood. Inevitably, it also reflected on the perceived status of those women readers who borrowed and devoured these fictions so hungrily. The novels of Braddon and Broughton in particular are studded with quotations from writers ranging such as William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Milton. In sensation fiction, sensitivity to poetry, and the ability to have an apposite quotation spring to one’s lips, is equated with sensitivity to life in general. In many examples of women’s sensation fiction, external proprieties are maintained, enabling their authors’ indignant self-defence against charges of immorality.Less
This chapter deals with the phenomenon of sensation fiction in the 1860s: fiction which deliberately catered to compulsive forms of consumption, and which the reviewers presented as being devoured by women. The sensation fiction’s frames of reference are drawn from familiar supppositions about woman’s affective susceptibility. Above all, the presence of sexual desire and sexual energy within the fictions was singled out. This disruptive potential was greeted with particular anxiety when it was located in novels written by women, notably Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Mrs Henry Wood. Inevitably, it also reflected on the perceived status of those women readers who borrowed and devoured these fictions so hungrily. The novels of Braddon and Broughton in particular are studded with quotations from writers ranging such as William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Milton. In sensation fiction, sensitivity to poetry, and the ability to have an apposite quotation spring to one’s lips, is equated with sensitivity to life in general. In many examples of women’s sensation fiction, external proprieties are maintained, enabling their authors’ indignant self-defence against charges of immorality.
Susan Jones
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184485
- eISBN:
- 9780191674273
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184485.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores Conrad's late works in relation to an earlier popular form of women's writing: the sensation novel of the 1860s and 1870s. By comparing Conrad's final, unfinished novel ...
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This chapter explores Conrad's late works in relation to an earlier popular form of women's writing: the sensation novel of the 1860s and 1870s. By comparing Conrad's final, unfinished novel Suspense, and the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, particularly Lady Audley's Secret (1862), this chapter shows the extent to which Conrad was indebted to the methods of female sensationalism right up to the end of his life.Less
This chapter explores Conrad's late works in relation to an earlier popular form of women's writing: the sensation novel of the 1860s and 1870s. By comparing Conrad's final, unfinished novel Suspense, and the sensation fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, particularly Lady Audley's Secret (1862), this chapter shows the extent to which Conrad was indebted to the methods of female sensationalism right up to the end of his life.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a ...
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The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.Less
The argument of this chapter is that the writing of sensation fiction was itself part of the critical endeavour to make sense of the enormous excitement that it produced. There is, in other words, a tendency towards self-investigation and self-reflection inherent in the sensational imagination. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora Floyd, for instance, seem to read and review, repeatedly, the very art that constitutes them. In accordance with Braddon’s letters to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, these novels, being engaged in a quest for their own meaning and social function, are uncertain about the very sensational effects that they helped to create. Likewise, the stories of Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and The Moonstone contain within themselves various models of the creative activity through which they were assembled and made into their characteristically suspended, drawn-out shape. By means of such models, the chapter argues, Collins’s writing makes itself legible, between the lines, as an experimental practice that composes its form as it goes along, rather than on the basis of a predefined plan.
Helena Ifill
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781784995133
- eISBN:
- 9781526136275
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781784995133.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics ...
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The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics as a negative determinant which could corrupt readers, and which both Victorian and modern critics have identified as predominantly concerned with plotting rather than characterisation. Contrastingly, I argue that sensation fiction is in fact very concerned with the creation of character and is sensitive to the varied ways in which the personality can be formed, modified and corrupted; the emphasis on plot is in fact an acknowledgement of the many uncontrollable factors which can dictate the course of a person’s life. Next, the relevant contextual background of ongoing scientific, medical and educational debates is explained, ranging from early theories of moral management, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and onwards to the development of degenerationist and eugenicist thought. Recurring topics of criminality, insanity and education are also introduced here, as are the theories of some of the prominent Victorian medical people whose work is drawn on extensively in future chapters. The Introduction ends with a summary of what the reader can expect in the rest of the book.Less
The introduction provides an overview of the intertwined strands which run through Creating character. Sensation fiction is introduced as a genre which was itself seen by Victorian literary critics as a negative determinant which could corrupt readers, and which both Victorian and modern critics have identified as predominantly concerned with plotting rather than characterisation. Contrastingly, I argue that sensation fiction is in fact very concerned with the creation of character and is sensitive to the varied ways in which the personality can be formed, modified and corrupted; the emphasis on plot is in fact an acknowledgement of the many uncontrollable factors which can dictate the course of a person’s life. Next, the relevant contextual background of ongoing scientific, medical and educational debates is explained, ranging from early theories of moral management, through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and onwards to the development of degenerationist and eugenicist thought. Recurring topics of criminality, insanity and education are also introduced here, as are the theories of some of the prominent Victorian medical people whose work is drawn on extensively in future chapters. The Introduction ends with a summary of what the reader can expect in the rest of the book.
Ruth Rosaler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198769743
- eISBN:
- 9780191822582
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769743.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to ...
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Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to appreciate the teasing, riddle-like quality of the narration. The chapter discusses implicatures in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. These implicatures satirize the realist tendency towards limited omniscience and play on an implied assumption of, rather than a lack of, reader knowledge. In these novels, implicature is neither a means towards acknowledging social convention nor an aid to characterization; it is rather an end in itself. This last chapter comments on the enjoyment readers derive from narrative indirection and the stylistic performativity it makes available to the author.Less
Chapter Three examines witty meta-narrative instances of sustained implicatures in sensation fiction. These implicatures encourage the reader not only to grasp unarticulated information but also to appreciate the teasing, riddle-like quality of the narration. The chapter discusses implicatures in M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. These implicatures satirize the realist tendency towards limited omniscience and play on an implied assumption of, rather than a lack of, reader knowledge. In these novels, implicature is neither a means towards acknowledging social convention nor an aid to characterization; it is rather an end in itself. This last chapter comments on the enjoyment readers derive from narrative indirection and the stylistic performativity it makes available to the author.
Benjamin Morgan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226442112
- eISBN:
- 9780226457468
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226457468.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival ...
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This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival of interest in Lucretian materialism, the chapter shows that Paterian aestheticism often portrayed physical objects as “enminded,” attenuating distinctions between inward self and outward world. The chapter shows how this idea of a vitalized aesthetic object grew from a widespread cultural reevaluation of scientific and philosophical materialisms, including in the period’s sensation fiction, and draws a connection between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and James Sully’s writing on physiological perception of music, which was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz. By contrast with George Eliot’s influential conception of the “web” of human relations described by the realist novel, writers such as Pater and Sully understood the figure of the web as made up of matter rather than of social relations.Less
This chapter challenges a common view that British aestheticism privileged the notion of an aesthetically sensitive, solipsistic individual. Situating Walter Pater’s fiction in relation to a revival of interest in Lucretian materialism, the chapter shows that Paterian aestheticism often portrayed physical objects as “enminded,” attenuating distinctions between inward self and outward world. The chapter shows how this idea of a vitalized aesthetic object grew from a widespread cultural reevaluation of scientific and philosophical materialisms, including in the period’s sensation fiction, and draws a connection between Pater’s Imaginary Portraits and James Sully’s writing on physiological perception of music, which was inspired by Hermann von Helmholtz. By contrast with George Eliot’s influential conception of the “web” of human relations described by the realist novel, writers such as Pater and Sully understood the figure of the web as made up of matter rather than of social relations.
Trish Ferguson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748673247
- eISBN:
- 9780748695256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748673247.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book is about Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet whose legal career began in 1894 when he was appointed county magistrate, and his fiction in relation to legislative and literary ...
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This book is about Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet whose legal career began in 1894 when he was appointed county magistrate, and his fiction in relation to legislative and literary history. It situates Hardy’s legal fiction within the legal consciousness of the late nineteenth century and its pervasive preoccupation with the law. It argues that Hardy’s work was shaped both by his awareness of individual cases and acrimonious debates over legal reforms, that he was influenced by sensation fiction and its legal plot lines, and that his open-ended narratives provoke his readers to examine legal issues which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning. These issues range from the limits of counsel to the definition of legal insanity, legal protection of women from abusive relationships and fundamental social inequalities exacerbated by the reform of land law. Finally, the book considers how Hardy’s fiction offers pseudo-legal representation in narratives that mirror the dialogic form of trial procedure.Less
This book is about Thomas Hardy, an English novelist and poet whose legal career began in 1894 when he was appointed county magistrate, and his fiction in relation to legislative and literary history. It situates Hardy’s legal fiction within the legal consciousness of the late nineteenth century and its pervasive preoccupation with the law. It argues that Hardy’s work was shaped both by his awareness of individual cases and acrimonious debates over legal reforms, that he was influenced by sensation fiction and its legal plot lines, and that his open-ended narratives provoke his readers to examine legal issues which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning. These issues range from the limits of counsel to the definition of legal insanity, legal protection of women from abusive relationships and fundamental social inequalities exacerbated by the reform of land law. Finally, the book considers how Hardy’s fiction offers pseudo-legal representation in narratives that mirror the dialogic form of trial procedure.
Trish Ferguson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748673247
- eISBN:
- 9780748695256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748673247.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in the context of debates surrounding the changing definition of legal insanity during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the McNaughten Rules and ...
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This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in the context of debates surrounding the changing definition of legal insanity during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the McNaughten Rules and its insistence that insanity must be understood in terms of cognitive impairment, the chapter argues that Hardy’s fiction raises hypothetical cases that reveal the lack of certainty around insanity cases, particularly in cases of provocation. It also discusses the influence of sensation fiction, which also explored the issues of legal insanity and criminal responsibility through a limited narrative perspective, on Hardy’s fiction as well as his use of third-person narrative to defend his characters mirroring the role of defence counsel. It contends that the use of a limited third-person narrative demonstrates the legal complexity of establishing mens rea as well as the difficulty of the relationship between intention and action.Less
This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in the context of debates surrounding the changing definition of legal insanity during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the McNaughten Rules and its insistence that insanity must be understood in terms of cognitive impairment, the chapter argues that Hardy’s fiction raises hypothetical cases that reveal the lack of certainty around insanity cases, particularly in cases of provocation. It also discusses the influence of sensation fiction, which also explored the issues of legal insanity and criminal responsibility through a limited narrative perspective, on Hardy’s fiction as well as his use of third-person narrative to defend his characters mirroring the role of defence counsel. It contends that the use of a limited third-person narrative demonstrates the legal complexity of establishing mens rea as well as the difficulty of the relationship between intention and action.
Philipp Erchinger
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474438957
- eISBN:
- 9781474453790
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438957.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much ...
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What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.Less
What is the connection between Victorian writing and experiment? Artful Experiments seeks to answer this question by approaching the field of literature and science in a way that is not so much centred on discourses of established knowledge as it is on practices of investigating what is no longer or not yet knowledge. The book assembles various modes of writing, from poetry and sensation fiction to natural history and philosophical debate, reading them as ways of knowing or structures in the making, rather than as containers of accomplished arguments or story worlds.
Offering innovative interpretations of works by George Eliot, Robert Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and others, alongside in-depth studies of philosophical and scientific texts by writers such as John S. Mill, Thomas H. Huxley, George H. Lewes and F. Max Müller, Artful Experiments explicates and re-conceives the relations between the arts and the sciences, experience and language as well as practice and theory. For many Victorians, the book argues, experimentation was just as integral to the making of literature as writing was integral to the making of science.
Trish Ferguson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748673247
- eISBN:
- 9780748695256
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748673247.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book examines how Thomas Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of ...
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This book examines how Thomas Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving definition of legal insanity, the campaign for legal equality for married women, and heightened discussion over land law reform. This book situates Hardy’s treatment of these issues in the context of debate in Parliament, the press, periodicals and sensation fiction. While noting the influence of sensation fiction on his literary output, this study argues that Hardy rejects the conventional endings of realist and sensation fiction to provoke his readership to examine legal questions which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning.Less
This book examines how Thomas Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving definition of legal insanity, the campaign for legal equality for married women, and heightened discussion over land law reform. This book situates Hardy’s treatment of these issues in the context of debate in Parliament, the press, periodicals and sensation fiction. While noting the influence of sensation fiction on his literary output, this study argues that Hardy rejects the conventional endings of realist and sensation fiction to provoke his readership to examine legal questions which he leaves unanswered in a modernist form of training in judicial reasoning.
Trish Ferguson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748673247
- eISBN:
- 9780748695256
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748673247.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in relation to the politics of land law reform and inheritance plots. More specifically, it looks at the increasing agitation for more democratic ...
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This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in relation to the politics of land law reform and inheritance plots. More specifically, it looks at the increasing agitation for more democratic landholding laws that coincided with the debate over extension of suffrage. It considers the Tichborne trial, an inheritance dispute and the class tensions over landholding rights, and how Hardy takes up sensation fiction’s preoccupation with property law to tackle criminal imposture as well as illicit attempts to acquire property. The chapter discusses Hardy’s novel Desperate Remedies to highlight the power wielded by the aristocracy over those with insecure land tenure.Less
This chapter examines Thomas Hardy’s legal fiction in relation to the politics of land law reform and inheritance plots. More specifically, it looks at the increasing agitation for more democratic landholding laws that coincided with the debate over extension of suffrage. It considers the Tichborne trial, an inheritance dispute and the class tensions over landholding rights, and how Hardy takes up sensation fiction’s preoccupation with property law to tackle criminal imposture as well as illicit attempts to acquire property. The chapter discusses Hardy’s novel Desperate Remedies to highlight the power wielded by the aristocracy over those with insecure land tenure.
Anna Despotopoulou
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748676941
- eISBN:
- 9781474412407
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676941.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
Chapter 1 examines journalistic and fictional accounts of the dangers of railway travel for women, specifically, narratives of robbery, murder, sexual abuse, and rape, which, on the one hand, served ...
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Chapter 1 examines journalistic and fictional accounts of the dangers of railway travel for women, specifically, narratives of robbery, murder, sexual abuse, and rape, which, on the one hand, served to acquaint women with the dangers of railway mobility, but, on the other, helped perpetuate a stereotype of woman as vulnerable, inept, and unable to defend her person and her possessions. The railway as a new setting of uncertain signification, permeable borders, and tentative safety accommodated very elaborate sensation plots, which, however, did not always victimize women. The chapter looks at fiction by popular novelists such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Rhoda Broughton, Ellen Wood, and Margaret Oliphant as well as by anonymous authors published in periodicals. As these texts show, the railway, in which all passengers’ social and personal identity seems precarious due to anonymity, was often treated as a stage by women who found opportunity to manipulate their behaviour and appearance in order to pursue economic or amorous aims. The train facilitated both the blurring of identity on which the sensation plot depended and the consequent subversion of gender conventions through female transgression that such fiction is famous for.Less
Chapter 1 examines journalistic and fictional accounts of the dangers of railway travel for women, specifically, narratives of robbery, murder, sexual abuse, and rape, which, on the one hand, served to acquaint women with the dangers of railway mobility, but, on the other, helped perpetuate a stereotype of woman as vulnerable, inept, and unable to defend her person and her possessions. The railway as a new setting of uncertain signification, permeable borders, and tentative safety accommodated very elaborate sensation plots, which, however, did not always victimize women. The chapter looks at fiction by popular novelists such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Rhoda Broughton, Ellen Wood, and Margaret Oliphant as well as by anonymous authors published in periodicals. As these texts show, the railway, in which all passengers’ social and personal identity seems precarious due to anonymity, was often treated as a stage by women who found opportunity to manipulate their behaviour and appearance in order to pursue economic or amorous aims. The train facilitated both the blurring of identity on which the sensation plot depended and the consequent subversion of gender conventions through female transgression that such fiction is famous for.
Nathan K. Hensley
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198792451
- eISBN:
- 9780191834448
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198792451.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter shows how Reform-era potboilers about the lost people like No Name (1863), The Woman in White (1860), and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) tactically reconfigure the mechanism of exclusion ...
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This chapter shows how Reform-era potboilers about the lost people like No Name (1863), The Woman in White (1860), and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) tactically reconfigure the mechanism of exclusion animating mass democracy. Following lost people until they become counted subjects, these plots—seen in dialogue with texts about induction like J. S. Mill’s A System of Logic (1843–73) and Karl Marx’s Capital (1867)—allegorize the state’s efforts to uplift particular bodies and convert them into members of a set, “citizens.” Armadale’s double-generational plot goes further, locating the violent origins of democratic induction in slavery and directing our attention to those cast out from law’s avowedly universal embrace. What the lost-person plots of the sensation novel mediate, then, is how abandonment and belonging evolved as mutually dependent characteristics of life at the center of capitalist modernity.Less
This chapter shows how Reform-era potboilers about the lost people like No Name (1863), The Woman in White (1860), and Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) tactically reconfigure the mechanism of exclusion animating mass democracy. Following lost people until they become counted subjects, these plots—seen in dialogue with texts about induction like J. S. Mill’s A System of Logic (1843–73) and Karl Marx’s Capital (1867)—allegorize the state’s efforts to uplift particular bodies and convert them into members of a set, “citizens.” Armadale’s double-generational plot goes further, locating the violent origins of democratic induction in slavery and directing our attention to those cast out from law’s avowedly universal embrace. What the lost-person plots of the sensation novel mediate, then, is how abandonment and belonging evolved as mutually dependent characteristics of life at the center of capitalist modernity.
Andrew Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474408912
- eISBN:
- 9781474445030
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474408912.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works ...
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This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.Less
This chapter examines the relationship between late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gothic, the sensation fiction of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, fin-de-siècle gothic works and modernism. It argues that in the late nineteenth century a distinctive, but implicit, gothic aesthetic developed which was characterised by a concern with divided selves, fragmented narratives and science. It also shows that this aesthetic was distinguished by optimistic narratives about adaptability and the presence of a mystical or spiritual world.
