Bringing together sensation writing and transatlantic studies, this collection makes a case for the symbiotic relationship between literary works on both sides of the Atlantic. "It also looks at the dialogue and debate generated by the publication of sentimental and gothic fiction by William Godwin, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown.
Bringing together sensation writing and transatlantic studies, this collection makes a convincing case for the symbiotic relationship between literary works on both sides of the Atlantic. Transatlantic Sensations begins with the 'prehistories' of the genre, looking at the dialogue and debate generated by the publication of sentimental and gothic fiction by William Godwin, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown.Thus establishing a context for the treatment of works by Louisa May Alcott, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dion Boucicault, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Lippard, Charles Reade, Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Thompson, the volumetakes up a wide range of sensational topics including sexuality, slavery, criminal punishment, literary piracy, mesmerism, and the metaphors of foreign literary invasion and diseased reading. Concluding essays offer a reassessment of the realist and domestic fiction of George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Thomas Hardy in the context of transatlantic sensationalism, emphasizing the evolution of the genre throughout the century and mapping a new transatlantic lineage for this immensely popular literary form. The book's final essay examines an international kidnapping case that was a journalistic sensation at the turn of the twentieth century.
'Transatlantic studies and sensationalism are currently vibrant areas in C19th studies. This volume explores their intersection, gathering together an exciting and original selection of essays. With a welcome emphasis on popular culture, the contributors highlight the many ways in which borrowings, serializations, textual piracy and adaptations reflected social and political differences on either side of the Atlantic, and created new channels of communication between English and American reading publics. This is essential reading for those working in the growing field of transatlanticism.' Kate Flint, Rutgers, University of Southern California, USA 'Scholars of the sensational will find significant information on the cultural anxieties about the foreign, the exotic, the radical, and the enslaved, and students will find thorough scholarship presented in accessible language. This is a valuable addition to the literature on transatlantic literary connections. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; researchers; general readers.' Choice '... indicated exciting new paths into a rich and fascinating field of research.' Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 'Transatlantic Sensations will be a valuable resource to scholars of sensation fiction, genre fiction more broadly, and those who study British-American publishing and literary influence, which are the collection's central methodological approaches.' BARS Review ... 'the editors have done a fine job of crystallizing how the transatlantic dimensions of sensationalist fiction, predicated as the subgenre was upon a process of commercial marketing and exchange, formed a central component of the nineteenthcentury novel in both Britain and America.' Victorian Studies
