Title: Science, sexuality and sensation novels : pleasures of the senses /
Authors: Garrison, Laurie, 1975-
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan,
Year: 2011
Subjects: English fiction History and criticism; Sensationalism in literature.; Senses and sensation in literature.; Heroines in literature; Science in literature.; Sex in literature; English fiction; Heroines in literature; LITERARY CRITICISM European English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.; Science in literature.; Sensationalism in literature.; Senses and sensation in literature.; Sex in literature.
Abstract: Science, sexuality and sensation novels offers the most detailed account of the prolific debate about the sensation novel published to date. Reviewers did not simply condemn and dismiss the genre; instead they theorized the sensual forms of reading the sensation novel inspired and they debated its effects on the body and the mind. Physiology in particular offered accounts of the body and the senses that aided in the formulation of theories of the physical reading that the sensation novel inspired. Sensation novelists helped to provoke reviewer attention to senses, bodies and physical stimulation through their own preoccupations with sciences centrally concerned with human physiology. Wilkie Collins and Rhoda Broughton were fascinated with trance states and wandering souls theorized in mesmerism and spiritualism. Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon and Ellen Wood investigated the tension between physiological impulse and social convention in theories of social science. This book seeks to offer a new and broader account of the influence of science in the formulation of one of the most popular and widely published genres of the Victorian period.
Contents: Taxonomies of stimulation: science, gender and sexuality in the sensation novel debate. The invention of the sensation novel: three early reviewers -- The debate intensifies: responses to the early reviewers -- Gender and sexuality in parodies of the sensation novel debate -- Magnetic science and the sensation novel: stimulating bodies, senses and souls. The interrelated histories of mesmerism, spiritualism and the sensation novel -- Mesmeric and erotic affinities in The woman in white -- Bodily pleasures and spiritual unions in Cometh up as a flower -- Social science and the rise of the sensation heroine: reconfiguring the female breeding body. From economics to evolution: sensationalising courtship, marriage and reproduction -- Great expectations: Estella's subtle sensations -- Aurora Floyd: a manifesto for the sensation heroine -- St Martin's Eve: variations of the sensation heroine -- Afterword: the afterlife of the sensation novel.