Department of English

“If the reader is not prepared to be poisoned, stabbed, blown into the air; to find a skeleton in every cupboard, and a lost will in every drawer; to meet with an inconvenient number of husbands, and a most perplexing superfluity of wives; and to get rid of them by means of arson, strangulation, or a deep well, he must be very insensible indeed to the influence and charm of the situation.” Thus wrote one reviewer of the Victorian “sensation novel”—a widely popular and somewhat scandalous genre whose common themes included kidnapping, theft, adultery, insanity, bigamy, forgery, mistaken identity, lies, impersonations, seduction and murder. These novels were “sensational” both in their extreme popularity and their appeal to the senses—their habit, as one Victorian reviewer put it, of “preaching to the nerves.” As these novels fictionalized the seamy underside of Victorian life, they often engaged with some of the most disturbing social issues of the day, especially widespread anxieties about changing gender roles. Readings to include: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.