Abstract
This introductory chapter considers first how the study of sensation fiction and modernity has narrowly conceived of that term, centring these novels’ depiction of nervous bodies and how those bodies are affected by technology and urbanity. It afterwards proposes that an alternate, ‘cultural discontinuity’ sense of modernity may be applied to help explain several curious features of the genre and reveal the crucial relevance of hitherto neglected contexts. Drawing particularly on Zygmunt Bauman’s theorizing of modernity as a struggle against ambivalence and Caroline Levine’s work on epistemological training through suspense, the Introduction contends that these novels prepared readers for the increasingly complex and uncertain world that was being produced through modernization. By proposing a polemical function to these novels, which is evidenced through the chapters that follow, the book thereby broaches a new understanding of the genre’s socio-political impetus, with implications for the study of other popular genres.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean, ed. by John Schad (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 378–379.
- 2.
See, for instance, Karin Koehler, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 143; Richard Nemesvari, Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 129, 146.
- 3.
It would also seem more expansive than Matthew Arnold’s original use of the term to mean ‘imaginative reason’; see Hardy, p. 416n3.
- 4.
Hardy, A Laodicean, p. 378.
- 5.
Nemesvari, Hardy, p. 147.
- 6.
Eva Badowska, ‘On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37.01 (2009), 157–175 (p. 172n1). Anne-Marie Beller observes that ‘modernity has proved a fruitful area for criticism of the genre [in recent years]’; ‘“The Fashions of the Current Season”: Recent Critical Work on Victorian Sensation Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 45.2 (2017), 461–473 (p. 469).
- 7.
Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), p. 19.
- 8.
Alberto Gabriele, ‘Introduction’, in Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity: A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective, ed. by Alberto Gabriele (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 8.
- 9.
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (London: University of California Press, 1988); Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).
- 10.
Bourne Taylor, Secret Theatre, p. 153.
- 11.
The most famous account, at least from a modern viewpoint, being H. L. Mansel, ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 112 (1863), 482–514.
- 12.
Nicholas Daly, ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, ELH, 66.2 (1999), 461–487 (p. 468).
- 13.
Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 37.
- 14.
Daly, ‘Railway Novels’, p. 478.
- 15.
Daly, ‘Railway Novels’, p. 475.
- 16.
For examples, see Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Daniel Martin, ‘Railway Fatigue and the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Review, 34.1 (2008), 131–153; Louise Lee, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret: How Does She Do It ? Sensation Fiction’s Technologically Minded Villainesses’, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Pamela K. Gilbert (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 134–146; Anna Despotopoulou, ‘Trains of Thought: The Challenges of Mobility in the Work of Rhoda Broughton’, Critical Survey, 23.1 (2011), 90–106; Dehn Gilmore, The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Karen M. Odden, ‘25 August 1861: The Clayton Tunnel Rail Crash, the Medical Profession, and the Sensation Novel’, Victorian Review, 40.2 (2014), 30–34.
- 17.
Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, p. 34.
- 18.
See this elision in, for instance, Beth Palmer, ‘Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century’, Victorian Studies, 52.1 (2009), 86–94 (p. 87); Anne-Marie Beller, ‘Popularity and Proliferation: Shifting Modes of Authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Vixen (1879)’, Women’s Writing, 23.2 (2016), 245–261 (p. 249); Pamela K. Gilbert, ‘Sensation Fiction and the Medical Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 182–195 (pp. 184–185).
- 19.
Michael Tondre, ‘“The Interval of Expectation”: Delay, Delusion, and the Psychology of Suspense in Armadale’, ELH, 78.3 (2011), 585–608 (p. 585).
- 20.
Beth Seltzer, ‘Fictions of Order in the Timetable: Railway Guides, Comic Spoofs, and Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Review, 41.1 (2015), 47–65 (pp. 48, 49–50).
- 21.
Seltzer, ‘Fictions of Order’, pp. 62, 63.
- 22.
Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, p. 24.
- 23.
See, among other works by these authors, Émile Durkheim, Le Suicide: Etude de Sociologie (Paris: F Alcan, 1897); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin University Books, 1930); Jean Baudrillard, ‘Modernity’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11.1 (1987), 63–72; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
- 24.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
- 25.
Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, pp. 4–7. Original emphasis.
- 26.
See, for instance, Singer, Modernity and Melodrama, p. 35.
- 27.
Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 10. Baudrillard is recalled here on two points: first, modernity is paradoxical and, second, ‘is itself only a vast ideological process’; ‘Modernity’, p. 70. Original emphasis.
- 28.
See, for instance, Peter Lamont, ‘Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence’, The Historical Journal, 47.4 (2004), 897–920; Alana Fletcher, ‘No Clocks in His Castle: The Threat of the Durée in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Review, 39.1 (2013), 55–69.
- 29.
Kate Flint emphasizes this interpretation of the Great Exhibition; Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 13, 46, 121, 172, 185. See also the Introduction especially of Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 30.
Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, ed. by Peter S. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 20.
- 31.
George Henry Lewes, ‘Studies in Animal Life’, Cornhill Magazine, 1.4 (1860), 438–447 (p. 438).
- 32.
Lewes, ‘Studies in Animal Life’, pp. 439, 441. Emphasis added.
- 33.
Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 32, 33.
- 34.
Mark Knight, ‘Figuring Out the Fascination: Recent Trends in Criticism on Victorian Sensation and Crime Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), 323–333 (p. 330).
- 35.
Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 2.
- 36.
George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 8.
- 37.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, p. 3.
- 38.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, pp. 11–12; 26.
- 39.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, p. 46.
- 40.
Peter Garrett, ‘Review of the Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt, by Caroline Levine’, The Modern Language Review, 100.2 (2005), 490–491 (p. 491).
- 41.
The typical plot of sensation fiction is discussed in chapters 3–5 of Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), and in Deborah Wynne, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 149.
- 42.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, p. 43n7. As Janice M. Allan explains, sensation fiction exploits the ‘representational strategies of realism’, and achieves its effects by evoking and inverting realism; ‘Sensationalism made real: The role of realism in the production of sensational affect’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43 (2015), 97–112 (p. 98).
- 43.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, p. 13. Original emphasis.
- 44.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, p. 3.
- 45.
Sophie Gilmartin quoted in Anne-Marie Beller, ‘Brief Encounters: Sensation Fiction and the Short Story’, Victoriographies, 12.3 (2022), 269–287 (p. 278).
- 46.
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ‘Sensation Fiction: A Peep Behind the Veil’, in The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. by Andrew Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 29–42 (p. 31).
- 47.
Anne-Marie Beller, ‘Sensation Fiction in the 1850s’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 7–20.
- 48.
Alfred Austin, ‘Our Novels: The Sensation School’, Temple Bar, 29 (1870), 410–424 (p. 414).
- 49.
Quoted in Daly, ‘Railway Novels’, p. 478.
- 50.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, pp. 7–8.
- 51.
‘Novels, Novel Readers, and Novel Writers’, The Scottish Review (July 1859), 239–251 (p. 243).
- 52.
Levine, Serious Pleasures, p. 12. Original emphasis.
- 53.
Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 10.
- 54.
Wynne, The Sensation Novel, p. 149.
- 55.
Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, p. 9.
- 56.
Baudrillard, ‘Modernity’, p. 70.
- 57.
Andrew Maunder, ed., Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1850–1890, (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), I, p. xxxv.
References
Allan, Janice M., ‘Sensationalism made real: The role of realism in the production of sensational affect’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43 (2015), 97–112
Austin, Alfred, ‘Our Novels: The Sensation School’, Temple Bar, 29 (1870), 410–424
Badowska, Eva, ‘On the Track of Things: Sensation and Modernity in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), 157–175
Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Modernity’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11.1 (1987), 63–72
Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
Beller, Anne-Marie, ‘Brief Encounters: Sensation Fiction and the Short Story’, Victoriographies, 12.3 (2022), 269–287
———, ‘“The Fashions of the Current Season”: Recent Critical Work on Victorian Sensation Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 45 (2017), 461–473
———, ‘Popularity and Proliferation: Shifting Modes of Authorship in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) and Vixen (1879)’, Women’s Writing, 23 (2016), 245–261
———, ‘Sensation Fiction in the 1850s’, in The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7–20
Bourne Taylor, Jenny, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988)
Cvetkovich, Ann, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992)
Daly, Nicholas, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
———, ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, Elh, 66 (1999), 461–487
Dames, Nicholas, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Despotopoulou, Anna, ‘Trains of Thought: The Challenges of Mobility in the Work of Rhoda Broughton’, Critical Survey, 23 (2011), 90–106
Durkheim, Émile, Le Suicide: Etude de Sociologie (Paris: F Alcan, 1897)
Fletcher, Alana, ‘No Clocks in His Castle: The Threat of the Durée in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Review, 39 (2013), 55–69
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Garrett, Peter, ‘Review of The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt, by Caroline Levine’, The Modern Language Review, 100 (2005), 490–491
Giddens, Anthony, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990)
Gilbert, Pamela K., Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
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Jameson, Frederic, A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2002)
Knight, Mark, ‘Figuring Out the Fascination: Recent Trends in Criticism on Victorian Sensation and Crime Fiction’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 37 (2009), 323–333
Koehler, Karin, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
Lamont, Peter, ‘Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence’, The Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 897–920
Lee, Louise, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret: How Does She Do It ? Sensation Fiction’s Technologically Minded Villainesses’, in A Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. by Pamela K. Gilbert (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 134–146
Levine, Caroline, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003)
Levine, George, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Lewes, George Henry, ‘Studies in Animal Life’, Cornhill Magazine, 1 (1860), 438–447
Mansel, H. L., ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 112 (1863), 482–514
Martin, Daniel, ‘Railway Fatigue and the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Review, 34 (2008), 131–153
Maunder, Andrew, ed., Varieties of Women’s Sensation Fiction: 1855–1890 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), I
Miller, D. A., The Novel and the Police (London: University of California Press, 1988)
Nemesvari, Richard, Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
‘Novels, Novel Readers, and Novel Writers’, The Scottish Review (July 1859), 239–251
Odden, Karen M., ‘25 August 1861: The Clayton Tunnel Rail Crash, the Medical Profession, and the Sensation Novel’, Victorian Review, 40 (2014), 30–34
Palmer, Beth, ‘Are the Victorians Still with Us?: Victorian Sensation Fiction and Its Legacies in the Twenty-First Century’, Victorian Studies, 52 (2009), 86–94
Seltzer, Beth, ‘Fictions of Order in the Timetable: Railway Guides, Comic Spoofs, and Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Review, 41 (2015), 47–65
Singer, Ben, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)
Smiles, Samuel, Self-Help, ed. by Peter S. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Tondre, Michael, ‘“The Interval of Expectation:” Delay, Delusion, and the Psychology of Suspense in Armadale’, ELH, 78 (2011), 585–608
Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin University Books, 1930)
Wynne, Deborah, The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001)
Young, Paul, Globalization and the Great Exhibition (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
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Green, J.A. (2024). Introduction. In: Sensation Fiction and Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49834-3_1
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