Literary genre of fiction that peaked in Great Britain in the 1860s-70s
For the theatrical work by W. S. Gilbert and Thomas German Reed, see A Sensation Novel.
The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved peak popularity in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s,[1] centering taboo material shocking to its readers as a means of musing on contemporary social anxieties.
Its literary forebears included the melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies; it also drew on the Gothic, romance, as well as mass market genres. The genre's popularity was conjoined to an expanding book market and growth of a reading public, by-products of the Industrial Revolution.[2] Whereas romance and realism had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature, they were brought together in sensation fiction. The sensation novelists commonly wrote stories that were allegorical and abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties[3] of the Victorian era. The loss of identity is seen in many sensation fiction stories because this was a common social anxiety; in Britain, there was an increased use in record keeping[4] and therefore people questioned the meaning and permanence of identity. The social anxiety regarding identity is reflected in novels such as The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret.[5]
Sensation fiction is commonly seen to have emerged as a definable genre in the wake of three novels: Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1859–60); Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne (1861); and Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862).[6] Perhaps the earliest use of the term "sensation fiction" as a name for such novels appears in the 1861 edition of the Saunders, Otley, & co.'s Literary Budget.[7]
Sensation novels were the precursor of pulp fiction, which were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955.[8][9]
^I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 844
^Muller, C. "Victorian Sensationalism: The Short Stories of Wilkie Collins." Unisa English Studies. 11.1 (1973): 12-13. Web. 8 Jun. 2014.
^Hughes, Winifred. The Maniac in the Cellar. Princeton: Princeton University, 1980. Print.
^Pykett, Lyn. "The Newgate novel and sensation fiction, 1830-1868." Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003. 19-39. Print
^Cite error: The named reference auto1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Loesberg, Jonathan. Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation. University of California, 1986. JSTOR. Web. 10 Jun. 2014.
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