Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers

Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers
Author: Anne-Marie Beller
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2015-09-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 131775400X

Scholarly understanding of the Victorian literary field has changed dramatically in the past thirty years, due in large part to the extensive recovery of sensation fiction and a corresponding recognition of that genre’s importance in the literary debates, trends, and wider cultural practices of the period. Yet until very recently, work on sensationalism has focused on a narrow range of authors and works, with Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Wood retaining the preponderance of critical attention. This collection examines the fiction of ten women sensation writers who were immensely popular in the Victorian period but remain critically neglected today – writers such as Annie Edwardes, M.C. Houstoun, Annie French, Dora Russell and others. The Victorian sensation novel was categorically associated with women by Victorian reviewers and this collection extends our current understanding of this sub-genre by showing that female sensation writers were often sophisticated in their textual strategies, employing a range of metafictional techniques and narrative innovations. By moving beyond the novelists who have come to represent the genre, this book presents a fuller, more nuanced, understanding of the spectrum of writing that constructed the concept of ‘sensationalism’ for Victorian readers and critics. The book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s Writing.

Victorian Sensation Fiction

Victorian Sensation Fiction
Author: Jessica Cox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2019-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137471727

Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2

British Women's Writing from Brontë to Bloomsbury, Volume 2
Author: Adrienne E. Gavin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2020-08-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030385280

This five-volume series, British Women’s Writing From Brontë to Bloomsbury, 1840–1940, historicallycontextualizes and traces developments in women’s fiction from 1840 to 1940. Critically assessingboth canonical and lesser-known British women’s writing decade by decade, it redefines the landscapeof women’s authorship across a century of dynamic social and cultural change. With each ofits volumes devoted to two decades, the series is wide in scope but historically sharply defined. Volume 2: 1860s and 1870s continues the series by historically and culturally contextualizing Victorianwomen’s writing distinctly within the 1860s and 1870s. Covering a range of fictional approaches,including short stories, religiously inflected novels, and comic writing the volume’s 16 original essaysconsider such developments as the sensation craze, the impact of new technologies, and the careeropportunities opening for women. Centrally, it reassesses key nineteenth-century female authors inthe context in which they first published while also recovering neglected women writers who helpedto shape the literary landscape of the 1860s and 1870s.

Sensation Drama, 1860-1880

Sensation Drama, 1860-1880
Author: Hofer-Robinson Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2019-04-03
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 147443956X

Features previously unpublished material alongside famous plays This pioneering edition provides access to some of the most popular plays of the nineteenth century. Characterised by exhilarating plots, large-scale special effects and often transgressive characterisation, these dramas are still exciting for modern readers. This anthology lays the foundation for further scholarly work on sensation drama and focuses public attention on to this influential and immensely popular genre. It features five plays from writers including Dion Boucicault and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. These are supported by a substantial critical apparatus, which adds further value to the anthology by providing rich details on performance history and textual variants. The critical introduction situates the genre in its cultural context and argues for the significance of sensation drama to shifting theatrical cultures and practices.Key FeaturesProvides detailed critical apparatus to facilitate the study of neglected plays, including performance history, notes and recommended further readingWidens the critical conversation on sensation drama by drawing attention to the work of female playwrightsReprints obscure works by popular authors and shows their involvement with both literary and theatrical cultures

Wilkie Collins in Context

Wilkie Collins in Context
Author: William Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 675
Release: 2023-07-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009037498

This collection of essays by international scholars celebrates the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins's birth by exploring his unconventional life alongside his works, critical responses to his writings and their afterlife, and the literary and cultural contexts which shaped his fiction. Topics discussed include gender, science and medicine, music, law, race and empire, media adaptations, neo-Victorianism, disability, and ethics. Along with an analysis of his novels, the essays included also recognize the importance of his short stories, journalism, and contributions to Victorian theatre, most notably illuminating the strong connections between sensation fiction and melodrama, as well as exploring his influence on film and TV. Engaging with yet also delving far beyond the famous novels, this volume promotes awareness of Collins' remarkable and diverse writerly achievements and paints a vivid portrait of an author whose fluctuating reputation among contemporary critics stands in stark contrast to his immense and still-enduring popularity.

Neo-Victorian Humour

Neo-Victorian Humour
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004336613

This volume highlights humour’s crucial role in shaping historical re-visions of the long nineteenth century, through modes ranging from subtle irony, camp excess, ribald farce, and aesthetic parody to blackly comic narrative games. It analyses neo-Victorian humour’s politicisation, its ideological functions and ethical implications across varied media, including fiction, drama, film, webcomics, and fashion. Contemporary humour maps the assumed distance between postmodernity and its targeted nineteenth-century referents only to repeatedly collapse the same in a seemingly self-defeating nihilistic project. This collection explores how neo-Victorian humour generates empathy and effective socio-political critique, dispensing symbolic justice, but also risks recycling the past’s invidious ideologies under the politically correct guise of comic debunking, even to the point of negating laughter itself. "This rich and innovative collection invites us to reflect on the complex and various deployments of humour in neo-Victorian texts, where its consumers may wish at times that they could swallow back the laughter a scene or event provokes. It covers a range of approaches to humour utilised by neo-Victorian writers, dramatists, graphic novelists and filmmakers – including the deliberately and pompously unfunny, the traumatic, the absurd, the ribald, and the frankly distasteful – producing a richly satisfying anthology of innovative readings of ‘canonical’ neo-Victorian texts as well as those which are potential generic outliers. The collection explores what is funny in the neo-Victorian and who we are laughing at – the Victorians, as we like to imagine them, or ourselves, in ways we rarely acknowledge? This is a celebration of the parodic playfulness of a wide range of texts, from fiction to fashion, whilst offering a trenchant critique of the politics of postmodern laughter that will appeal to those working in adaptation studies, gender and queer studies, as well as literary and cultural studies more generally." - Prof. Imelda Whelehan, University of Tasmania, Australia

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel
Author: Nadine Böhm-Schnitker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000966488

Towards an Aisthetics of the Victorian Novel: Senses and Sensations establishes a new analytical method in the broader context of sensory studies in order to explain how the genre of the novel can impact on our perception of ourselves and our social contexts. Taking cultural literary studies ahead, the book re-integrates aesthetics – a much fraught concept in cultural studies that long favoured ‘popular’ over ‘high culture’ – into cultural studies as aisthetics in the word’s root sense of ‘perception’. Zooming in on period shifts and changes in taste spanning realism, sensation fiction and aestheticism, aisthetics reveals how these shifts also pertain to new ways of perceiving in selected novels by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Vernon Lee. Connecting Victorian and current literary theories, aisthetics helps explore the way in which the novel can shape the way we perceive the world, what remains excluded from the realm of the perceivable and how our conduct is consequently always also influenced by the dominant genres of our time.

100 British Crime Writers

100 British Crime Writers
Author: Esme Miskimmin
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113731902X

100 British Crime Writers explores a history of British crime writing between 1855 and 2015 through 100 writers, detailing their lives and significant writing and exploring their contributions to the genre. Divided into four sections: ‘The Victorians, Edwardians, and World War One, 1855-1918’; ‘The Golden Age and World War Two, 1919-1945’; ‘Post-War and Cold War, 1946-1989’; and ‘To the Millennium and Beyond, 1990-2015’, each section offers an introduction to the significant features of these eras in crime fiction and discusses trends in publication, readership, and critical response. With entries spanning the earliest authors of crime fiction to a selection of innovative contemporary novelists, this book considers the development and progression of the genre in the light of historical and social events.

Steampunk London

Steampunk London
Author: Helena Esser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2024-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350433926

Tracing the genre through fiction, visual art, film and videogames from the 1980s to the present, this book offers a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between neo-Victorianism, urban spaces and Steampunk. Characterised by its interplay between past and present and its anachronistic retro-speculation, Neo-Victorian-infused Steampunk remixes modern collective memory to produce a re-imagined vision of Victorian London. Investigating how Steampunk's re-calibrated Londons both source from and subvert Victorian discourse about the city, Steampunk London offers a deeper understanding of how a popular cultural memory of the Victorian past is shaped and transmitted in light of present-day identity politics. Covering key themes including retrofuturism, gender and sexuality, colonialism and postcolonialism, it considers such ideas as how early Steampunk synthesizes Victorian urban ethnography; how Victorian urban Gothic shapes shared transmedia memory to challenge reactionary, nostalgic meta-narratives; how Steampunk video games mobilize urban space as an immersive storytelling device with cities open to play; and how Steampunk interprets the modern metropolis as an opportunity for feminist and queer agency. Through examination of Victorian-era writers from Charles Dickens to Arthur Conan Doyle, the book digs into works of fiction and media alike, looking at The Difference Engine, Soulless, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, cyberpunk classic Blade Runner, and Assassin's Creed: Syndicate and The Order 1886. An important intervention in the study of steampunk, Helena Esser demonstrates how the works explored invite participatory consumption and considers the genre's potential- and failures- to interrogate and challenge our relationship with the Victorian past.

Alice in Wonderland in Film and Popular Culture

Alice in Wonderland in Film and Popular Culture
Author: Antonio Sanna
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2022-10-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3031022572

This book examines the many reincarnations of Carroll’s texts, illuminating how the meaning of the original books has been re-negotiated through adaptations, appropriations, and transmediality. The volume is an edited collection of eighteen essays and is divided into three sections that examine the re-interpretations of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in literature, film, and other media (including the branches of commerce, music videos, videogames, and madness studies). This collection is an addition to the existing work on Alice in Wonderland and its sequels, adaptations, and appropriations, and helps readers to have a more comprehensive view of the extent to which the Alice story world is vast and always growing.