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SoSe 22: Victorian Sensation Fiction

Stephan Karschay

Zusätzl. Angaben / Voraussetzungen

Regelmäßige und aktive Teilnahme, Lektüre aller im Seminar diskutierten Texte, seminarbegleitende Studienleistungen (wie z.B. response paper, Gruppenpräsentation, Expertengruppe), abschließende Seminararbeit. Die Seminarsprache ist Englisch; die Primärtexte werden im englischen Original gelesen.

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Kommentar

The serialisation of Wilkie Collins’s mystery novel The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round from 1859 to 1860 is often regarded as the birth of a new type of fiction in Victorian England that came to dominate the literary market in the 1860s: the sensation novel. Even though recent criticism has widened the remit of the genre to include examples from earlier decades, Collins’s novel of mystery, deception and murder exerted an unprecedented cultural influence: readers (like the seasoned novelist W.M. Thackeray) are reported to have sat up all night ploughing through the pages of Collins’s doorstopper in a frenzy to find out what happened next. The novel became a singular object of consumption in other respects as well: ladies with money to spare could treat themselves to Woman-in-White fashion and Woman-in-White perfume, and music lovers could dance to Woman-in-White waltzes. Other novelists followed Collins and created ever more exciting ‘novels with a secret’, and the 1860s alone saw two further genre-shaping examples with Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861). This overwhelming popular success prompted conservative critics to rail against these titillating productions: the novelist Margaret Oliphant was appalled by the representation of sensation fiction’s heroines as “fleshly and unlovely”, and the Dean of St Paul’s, Henry L. Mansel, condemned sensation authors like Collins, Braddon and Charles Reade for offering cheap literary fare and – more dangerously – for “preaching to the nerves” of their readers. In this seminar, students will read two long sensation novels (The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret)and one shorter example taken from the genre of detective fiction (Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles) – a form that can be fruitfully traced to the sensation novels of the 1860s. We will place these novels in their rich historical and cultural contexts and engage with the immediate responses to the genre. We will study sensation fiction’s generic predecessors (such as the Gothic romance and the silver-fork-novel) and weigh its significance for modern forms like the crime novel and the psychological thriller.

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Literaturhinweise

Zur Anschaffung: Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [1859-1860], ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). [ISBN: 9780199535637]; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret [1862], ed. Lyn Pykett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). [ISBN: 9780199577033]; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles [1902], ed. Christopher Frayling (London: Penguin, 2001). [ISBN: 9780140437867].

Zur Einführung geeignet: Kate Flint, “Sensation”, in K.F., ed., The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 220-242.

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