Allan, JM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4484-7778
2015,
'Sensationalism made real : the role of realism in the production of sensational affect'
, Victorian Literature and Culture, 43 (01)
, pp. 97-112.
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Abstract
Like all complicated relationships, that between realism and sensationalism has been subject to a good deal of rumour and speculation. In what might be described as the pair's first critical encounter – in an 1852 joint review of W. M. Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond and Wilkie Collins's proto-sensation novel Basil – a critic for Bentley's Miscellany intimates that a partnership between two such different forms is anything but likely. “We have,” he explains, “put these two books ‘over against’ each other, to use one of Mr. Thackeray's favourite Queen-Anne-isms, because they have no kind of family resemblance. They are, indeed, as unlike each other as any two books can be. They constitute a kind of literary antithesis” (“Esmond” 576). The inherently contradictory nature of this originary “over against” gesture – conflating proximity and distance, contiguity and difference – sets the keynote for subsequent discussions, contemporaneous and current, of a generic relationship that continues to attract and elude definition.
Item Type: | Article |
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Schools: | Schools > School of Arts & Media > Arts, Media and Communication Research Centre |
Journal or Publication Title: | Victorian Literature and Culture |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
ISSN: | 1060-1503 |
Related URLs: | |
Funders: | Non funded research |
Depositing User: | JM Allan |
Date Deposited: | 16 Dec 2015 09:38 |
Last Modified: | 15 Feb 2022 20:07 |
URI: | http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/37554 |
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