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Servants and the Victorian Sensation Novel
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 4, Autumn 2014
- pp. 835-851
- 10.1353/sel.2014.0042
- Article
- Additional Information
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Critics have long considered the Victorian sensation novel a difficult genre to define. The thread that connects these seemingly disparate works is class: the sensation novel may be defined as a genre that disrupts a middle-class perspective. The sensation novel forces readers to attend to multiple class perspectives; it aligns the act of reading and piecing together clues with the surveillance of a servant; and it revalues femininity while suggesting that what is perceived as gender is actually a function of class privilege.