Sensation fiction

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Shannon R. Wooden (Missouri State University); Brett Young
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Victorian sensation fiction may be crudely but accurately enough understood via modern day analogy: roughly equivalent to twenty-first century true-life crime stories and dramatized documentaries, the hugely successful sensation subgenre dominated the English public imagination for much of the 1860s and 70s and featured criminal events often “ripped from the headlines”, augmented with fictional detail to render wildly popular page-turners that transcended class divisions in its readership. Attending to the analyses provided by modern scholars of the novel form, one might also compare it to our blockbuster action movies: driven by plot, tolerant of otherwise unbelievable contrivances, and preferring clever caricatures to fully developed, psychologically real characters (Terry 57)—but…

2741 words

Citation: Wooden, Shannon R., Brett Young. "Sensation fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 June 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1002, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1002 Sensation fiction 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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