The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel

by Lyn Pykett

A fully revised edition of The Sensation Novel taking account of wider interest in, and critical coverage of, this important and popular genre. First published in 1994, Lyn Pykett's The Sensation Novel from 'The Woman in White' to 'The Moonstone' charted the re-emergence into critical view of a nineteenth-century fictional genre which had, in its own day, enjoyed immense popular success and given rise to heated critical and moral debates. Since the mid-1990s, the sensation novel has continued to attract the attention of both general readers and critics and scholars. In the last fifteen years, the sensation novel has been brought to fresh audiences in numerous new editions and in new television and radio adaptations of Lady Audley's Secret, The Woman in White and The Moonstone, an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on The Woman in White and a film of Basil. Among the recent studies of the genre, several have sought to shift critical attention from an exclusive focus on Braddon, Collins and Wood and relatively narrow range of texts published in the 1860s to include texts from later decades of the century. This revised and expanded version, retitled The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel, responds to these developments, taking account of recent studies of the genre, and expanding both the range of authors covered and its discussion of the authors originally included.

128 pages, Paperback

First published December 30, 2011

Reviews

[Katelyn Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great discussion of the sensation novel, the circumstances that created it, and the importance of women (as both readers and writers) to the genre. Overly focused on the sensation novel in British literature, more or less ignoring that a similar occurrence was happening in other areas.