Victorian Sensational Fiction

Sensation fiction emerged in the 1860s, and immediately generated alarm as many critics viewed the genre as a threat to prevailing Victorian values. Charles Reade, along with Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, was among the most well-known sensation novelists. With its explicit critique of power relations in the fields of medicine, criminal justice, and sexual mores, Reade's work anticipates Michel Foucault's theories elaborated a century later. Reade's work also provides rare glimpses of alternative sexualities and gender identities in nineteenth-century fiction. This book recovers the fiction of Charles Reade as a body of work that anticipates recent trends in literary and cultural theory.

"Fantina's analysis of a controversial Victorian author is not only compelling but timely. Fantina's book illuminates the important contributions that Reade's often neglected works make to our understanding of Victorian social institutions (e.g. prisons and madhouses), gender ideology, and alternative sexualities--in essence, demonstrating how Reade's fiction was daring in its challenge of Victorian norms of sexuality, class, and gender. Moving nimbly among fictional analyses, critical theory, and historical information, Fantina illuminates how Reade's fiction anticipates and confirms the theoretical concerns of Foucault, whose sophisticated works Fantina reads as effectively as Reade's fiction."--Catherine J. Golden, Skidmore College and author of "Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing"

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"Through close and historically contextualized analyses, Fantina shows that in many of his fictions Charles Reade responds to conditions and thinks through questions that ha

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