Beth Palmer

Beth Palmer brings new perspectives to the study of sensation fiction in the Victorian period, a popular genre often involving narratives of crime and madness. By examining the self-conscious and complex ways in which Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat used sensation as both authors and magazine editors she re-works the conventional perspective that sensation fiction was a hackneyed, formulaic, and limited genre. Palmer offers a new, broadercontext for the phenomenal success of works like Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wood's East Lynne.The book also provides a larger context to this important relationship between sensation and the periodical by reaching back to explore the vital press conditions initiated byfigures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton in the mid-nineteenth century and by looking forwards to the New Woman writers of the 1890s to understand the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.

Sensational Strategies

Women's Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture

An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the era, this Companion explores influential dramatic works by Ibsen, Shaw and Wilde; the poetry of mourning; novelistic genres, including social problem novels and sensation fiction; and the literature of the fin de siècle’s aesthetes and decadents. Cultural and historical debates – focussing on empire, national identity, science and evolution, print culture and gender – supply essential context alongside discussion of relevant critical theory.

Victorian Literature

York Notes Companions

Adelene Buckland

In 1957, Richard Altick's groundbreaking work The English Common Reader transformed the study of book history. Inspired by Altick's research, but digging deep into the neglected records of prison libraries, army barracks or convict ships the authors of A Return to the Common Reader dramatically reconfigure our understanding of the ordinary Victorian readers whose efforts and choices changed our literary culture forever.

Print Culture and the Novel, 1850-1900

A Return to the Common Reader

Karen Sayer

Get everything you need to achieve your full potential at English Literature A Level or AS with York Notes Study Guides, now updated for Assessment Objectives 1 to 5.

Beth Palmer

Books

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