Sensation Fiction and Modernity

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 modernity appears equally in sensation fiction 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. Deploying such a sense of modernity, so this study demonstrates, does not merely uncover the genre's engagements with a variety of mid-century contexts hitherto neglected within criticism. 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 an early-career researcher working in nineteenth-century studies. He completed an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Exeter in June 2019. James has been the Book Reviews Editor for Literature & History and an Assistant Teacher for the University of Bristol and the University of Exeter.