Violent Women and Sensation Fiction
Subtitle: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: October 2, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780230545212
Subjects: Literary studies: 19th century; Popular culture; Women's studies; c 1800 to c 1900; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; United Kingdom, Great Britain; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Europe - Great Britain - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; 19th century; English fiction; History and criticism; Sensationalism in literature; Women in literature
Description: This new study explores the way that stories and images of 'explosive' femininity worked across generic and disciplinary boundaries during the Victorian era. Andrew Mangham explores the era's problematic criminalisation of female behaviour with reference to medical theories on women's psychology, reports of notorious criminal cases, like Constance Kent's and Madeline Smith's, and the popular fictions of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Wilkie Collins.