A Companion to Sensation Fiction ed. by Pamela K. Gilbert (review)

Pamela K. Gilbert’s A Companion to Sensation Fiction assembles a set of lucid and informed essays that bid for the history, artistry, and ongoing cultural significance of the sensation genre. The volume, the first of its kind to address sensation fiction (contributor Andrew Mangham’s The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction [2013] has just appeared), brings together established authorities with some newer critical voices to offer comprehensive coverage. The Companion addresses familiar contextual issues in the field—imperialism, the history of medicine, and the role of the periodical press—and ranges over subgenres from silver fork novels to twenty-first-century neo-Victorianism, and methods from legal history to cognitivism. Presenting sensation fiction as a self-consciously topical genre, Gilbert initially calls into doubt the value of close reading in preference for a historicism that lights up “the broader context of the nonlinear, mutating, increasingly rhizomatic structure of Victorian literary, publishing, and consumer culture” (4). But this somewhat sensational critical moment prefaces careful, if sometimes well-rehearsed, scholarship throughout.

The Companion divides sections along the lines of genre history, individual authors, and themes. The first section, “Before Sensation, 1830–1860,” examines what Gilbert loosely terms “modes of narration,” ranging variously from specific forms like the Newgate novel or stage melodrama to broader issues of realism or the gothic (4). What unites these essays more than their conceptual equivalence is their effort to balance genre history with attention to literary nuance. The format is sometimes too short to allow for full discussion of sensation fiction’s positioning of other genres and forms, but each features compelling exemplifications. It might have been valuable also to add to this first section a sustained reading of periodical responses, especially Henry Mansel’s infamous 1863 review, “Sensation Novels,” which is treated in many of the volume’s chapters as a preliminary foil. Given the importance of the press in defining the genre, and Mansel’s prominence in this volume, it is curious that only Kirstie Blair (writing on poetry) and Mark Knight (on religion) follow the example set by Jonathan Loesberg’s foundational essay on ideology, “The Ideology of Narrative Form in Sensation Fiction” (1986), of treating periodical writing as itself an exercise in genre-making.

The second section, “Reading Individual Authors and Texts, 1860–1880,” provides interpretive biography of the best known writers as well as thematic readings of the more commonly taught novels. Most essays here focus ultimately on issues of sexual subversion, though Susan Zieger’s nuanced essay on substance addiction and epistemology in The Moonstone (1868) is a welcome outlier. This section also includes eight chapters on other figures, from Sheridan Le Fanu and Rhoda Broughton to Charlotte Brame and Mary Cecil Hay (the discussion of the latter showcases the rewards of print history). Like all companion volumes, this is aimed at undergraduate and graduate readers developing a research agenda for the first time, and these essays consistently address this audience’s needs: most offer careful bibliographic summary and often indicate avenues for further research. They will certainly provoke new projects on some of these underserved authors, even if the necessarily summary accounts of their works tend to be more thorough than daring. The third section, “Topics in Scholarship,” may be most useful for the volume’s intended audience: these essays make up a rich and self-reflective sourcebook of the methods of Victorian studies. While the arguments feel familiar, these essays showcase developments toward interdisciplinarity, from the history of print journalism to disability studies. The essays in this section proceed swiftly through a wide range of sensation fiction without overemphasizing Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, including work on queer sensation (Ross G. Forman); class and race (Patrick Brantlinger); empire, in a sustained reading of Felicia Skene’s Hidden Depths (1866) (Lillian Nayder); anti-Catholicism and biblical criticism (Knight); disability as a historicized concept (Martha Stoddard Holmes and Mark Mossman); and divorce law (Jane Jordan). A shorter section, “After Sensation: Legacies...