Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-207) and index.
Contents:
Preface: Centring sensationalism -- Introduction: Hyperrealism and Victorian affects -- 1. Immersive reading and sensational emplotment -- 2. Morbidity and sensational authorship -- 3. Privacy and "public feeling" in Salem Chapel and Armadale -- 4. Crowds and bodily sympathy in Wood and Clive -- 5. Collins, Hardy and Reade's sympathetic doubles -- Coda: The affective pleasures of reading and not reading.
Summary:
"Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues that Victorian sensation novels -- long dismissed as plot-driven, silly, and feminine -- develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining, and even writing a narrative. The popular sensation novel thus should be understood as a key contribution to the novel's assessment of its own workings, especially the ways in which reading and writing figure as affective acts. Additionally, the book radically expands the field of sensation fiction, taking seriously lesser-known female authors, and reading them alongside a range of writers not typically considered sensational. These novels insist that feelings are not bound to a single body and that bodies generate meaning when they are put in relation to other bodies and systems of knowledge"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.