Sensation novel

Common card · No. 324004

The sensation novel, also sensation fiction, was a literary genre of fiction that achieved its peak popularity in Great Britain from the mid-1850s to the 1890s, centring on taboo material that was shocking to its readers. The material itself was a means of musing on contemporary social anxieties. Its literary forebears included the melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies; it also drew on the Gothic, romance, and mass market genres. The genre's popularity paralleled an expanding book market and the growth of a reading public, by-products of the Industrial Revolution. Whereas romance and realism had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature, they were brought together in sensation fiction. The sensation novelists commonly wrote stories that were allegorical and abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties of the Victorian era. The loss...

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