Sensation fiction

Abstract

Featuring crimes such as murder, bigamy, or adultery in seemingly proper middle‐class homes, the sensation novel of the 1860s and early 1870s tantalized readers with clues and leads of false identities, hidden pasts, and uncanny doubles. Appalled Victorian critics accused sensational writers such as Wilkie Collins, Ellen Wood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood of catering to popular appetite, preaching to the nerves, undermining morality, and aligning the reading matter of the kitchen with that of the drawing room. Recent critics, however, have explored the sensation novel as a popular form that exploited contemporary fascination with a nervous, embodied reader, self‐conscious about the mass print marketplace; that contained a clash between realism and sensational effects; that mastered a combination of visual and verbal vocabulary; that disrupted Victorian boundaries of race, class, gender, and disability; that wielded influence on the novels of the fin de siècle; and that was redolent of emergent modernism.