The sensation novel then and now

The sensation novel has long been considered a relatively minor popular genre that lasted for about a decade during the Victorian period. I argue, on the contrary, that the genre lived on and has experienced a renaissance in a varied group of contemporary novels that recreate the form in all its original complexity and detail. My study focuses on the Victorian sensation novels (including novels by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens) and on "neo-sensation" novels by British and American writers including A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, Jane Smiley, and Richard Powers. I also analyze pop cultural exemplars of the genre to demonstrate the continuity of certain generic characteristics and to illustrate that the neo-sensation novel is a notable departure from the mass of sensation novels that have, generally, capitalized on only the most superficial aspects of their Victorian predecessors.; In this study I accomplish two goals. First, I add to the definition of the sensation novel several new elements. I establish that the novels foreground a concern with public versus private crimes, and that many of the most sensational elements provide a kind of smokescreen for the more conventional crimes which lie at the heart of nearly all sensation novels. I isolate several narrative techniques common to sensation novels that both defer and finally precipitate revelation: the reluctant detective, the extra motive, and the layering of discourses. Finally, I argue that sensation novels, while remaining within the realm of fictional realism, take as their subject matter the problems of probability and the role of romance in everyday life.; This study also enlarges our view of the relationship between genre and ideological stances, and of the relationship between novel forms and the cultural work they accomplish. I argue that the Victorian sensation novels and the neo-sensation novels use the same generic elements, but to opposing ideological ends. Whereas the nineteenth-century novelists used the concept of sensation to decenter a dominant strain of Victorian ideology, the neo-sensation novelists have used the concept to challenge, or re-center, a particular strain of postmodern ideology.