Sensation Fiction and Modeity:The Meanings of Ambivalence in Mid-Victorian Britain

by: James Aaron Green (Author)

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Publication Date: April 26, 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 241 pages

ISBN-10: 303149833X

ISBN-13: 9783031498336

Book Description

This book re-reads the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and modeity. Whereas critics have long recognized its appearance in the form of nervous subjects and technologically-enabled mobility, Green contends that sensation fiction also depicts modeity 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 modeity 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 mode existence.
This book re-reads the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and modeity. Whereas critics have long recognized its appearance in the form of nervous subjects and technologically-enabled mobility, Green contends that sensation fiction also depicts modeity 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 modeity 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 mode existence. Read more