In Problem Novels, Anna Maria Jones argues that, far from participating “invisibly” in disciplinary regimes, many Victorian novels articulate sophisticated theories about the role of the novel in the formation of the self. In fact, it is rare to find a Victorian novel in which questions about the danger or utility of novel reading are not embedded within the narrative. In other words, one of the stories that the Victorian novel tells, over and over again, is the story of what novels do to readers. This story occurs in moments that call attention to the reader’s engagement with the text.
 

In chapters on Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith, Jones examines “problem novels”—that is, novels that both narrate and invite problematic reading as part of their theorizing of cultural production. Problem Novels demonstrates that these works posit a culturally imbedded, sensationally susceptible reader and, at the same time, present a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts. Thus, the novels theorize, paradoxically, a reader who is both unconsciously interpellated and critically empowered. And, Jones argues, it is this paradoxical construction of the unconscious/critical subject that re-emerges in the theoretical paradigms of Victorian cultural studies scholarship. Indeed, as Problem Novels shows, Victorianists’ attachments to critical “detective work” closely resemble the sensational attachments that we assume shaped Victorian novel readers.

The greatest portrayer of blue-fire deviltry, Edward Fitzball was a melodramatist on the nineteenth-century British stage. His Theatre of the Macabre was very much a forebearer of the sensationalized media of today. This book discusses Fitzball’s life, and his dramatic oeuvre.

Wildly popular with Victorian readers, sensation fiction was condemned by most critics for scandalous content and formal features that deviated from respectable Victorian realism. Victorian Sensations is the first collection to examine sensation fiction as a whole, showing it to push genre boundaries and resist easy classification. Comprehensive in scope, this collection includes twenty original essays employing various critical approaches to cover a range of topics that will interest many readers. In addition to well-known novels such as The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins and Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, this volume addresses other works by Collins and Braddon as well as those of Sheridan Le Fanu, Rhoda Broughton, Charles Reade, Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood, and perhaps surprisingly, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.  Sensation literature, once considered one-dimensionally as a vehicle for contrived, plot-driven stories of mystery and intrigue, is shown here as a multi-faceted formal and ideological hybrid.  Essays are organized thematically into three sections: issues of genre; sensational representations of gender and sexuality; and the texts’ complex readings of diverse social and cultural phenomena such as class, race, and empire. The introduction reviews critical reception of sensation fiction to situate these new essays within a larger scholarly context.   Victorian Sensations aims to further previous efforts to recognize sensation fiction as an integral part of Victorian literature and not as the subgenre that it has too long been considered. The collection’s broad scope indicates the breadth and complexity of the genre itself.