Précis Reviews

Harrison, Kimberly, and Richard Fantina, eds. Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006. Cloth 278 pp. $49.95 CD $9.95

"Despite the outrage of Victorian critics and churchmen, sensation novels were frequently bestsellers," outshining the novels of classic Victorian realism with their shocking themes of "bigamy, illegitimacy, drug abuse, murder, inheritance scandals, and adultery." Yet, as Harrison and Fantina point out in their introduction to this collection of twenty essays, even more famous works such as Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White have often been relegated to the heading of "sensation fiction," a genre that is the "bastard child of classic Victorian realism, something to be read as a curiosity but certainly not to be taken too seriously." Thus Harrison and Fantina set out to question this apparent dichotomy—while contemporary critics attacked the sensation novel as "highly seasoned garbage," they at the same time relished this most "highly flavored dish" (see chapter one, Helen Miller Casey's "'Highly Flavoured Dishes' and 'Highly Seasoned Garbage': Sensation in the Athenaeum"). This collection realizes new scholarly insights into the cultural importance of the sensation novel. Although Collins is often discussed, other novelists included are Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret) and even Dickens and Hardy. The first section addresses issues of genre; the second focuses on issues of gender and sexuality (sensation novels "almost gleefully hammering at the Victorian façade of the harmonious home"); and the third considers class, racial, and cultural contexts. This is the basic setting for gems of essays that are actually entertaining to read; for example, chapter nine is about "Sensational Hair," while chapter ten delves into "Nineteenth-Century Psychology and the Horrors of Masculinity" with "sensational" details about Victorian obstetrics. Or, read chapter eight concerning the power of large, busty women. Many of the essays go beyond the "sensational sixties" into the realm of our readership. Chapter seven analyzes the influence of Swedenborg on the works of Le Fanu, an author compared by some critics to Henry James in his use of psychological terror. Rather than "embracing essentialist notions of class, gender, race, and religion, the sensation novelists often complicate and at times defy them," argue the editors, who further propose that the characters in these novels are freed from any "credible moral focus," thus free to "invent their own lives." Harrison and Fantina justifiably claim that "the genre anticipates the loss of faith and the fragmentation of identity that would later characterize modernist fiction," and they successfully solidify the importance of the sensation novel within the literary canon. Victorian Sensations is a well-organized, comprehensive volume of scholarship.

Jones, Anna Maria. Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. 163 pp. Cloth $34.95 CD $9.95

For all the lofty invocations of Foucault and "studies that describe the intricate workings of power and cultural production on unconscious subjects in Victorian culture … from a privileged position of critical empowerment and distance," Jones makes the point that we as modern literary critics are just as intrigued by the Sensation Novel as the Victorian critics were. Along with the reader, the critic is under the spell of unraveling the dark secrets hidden in the novels—we suspect that a secret power "is at work invisibly in some historical context," that we must "ferret out" that secret through "the critic's detective work, sifting for textual clues." Our moment of triumph comes as we "reveal the secret to a readership attuned to the sensational nuances of the genre." Jones's aim in this study is to "explore the idea that our critical projects have more in common with the 'disciplined' (Victorian) reader of Victorian novels than we generally admit" and that in fact "the Victorians were not so sensationally susceptible to discipline...