Shocking And Sensational

'Victorian Sensation' sheds light on the Victorians' fascination with celebrity culture and their obsession with gruesome and explicit reportage of murders and sex scandals. With a vivid cast of characters, ranging from the serial poisoner William Palmer, to Charles Dickens, Jumbo the Elephant, distinguished politicians and even the Queen herself, this passionate analysis of the period reveals how the reporting methods of our own popular media have their origins in the Victorian press, and shows that sensation was as integral a part of society in the nineteenth century as it is today.

Already part of a genre known for generating controversy, some true crime and scandal books have wielded a particular power to unsettle readers, provoke authorities and renew interest in a case. The reactions to such literature have been as contentious as the books themselves, clouding the "truth" with myths and inaccuracies. From high-profile publishing sensations such as Ten Rillington Place, Fatal Vision and Mommie Dearest to the wealth of writing on the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Black Dahlia murder, this book delves into that hard copy era when crime and scandal books had a cultural impact beyond the genre's film and TV documentaries, fueling outcries that sometimes matched the notoriety of the cases they discussed and leaving legacies that still resonate today.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, Sensational Modernism uncovers a rich vein of experimental work by politically progressive artists. Examining images by photographers such as Weegee and Aaron Siskind and fiction by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and Pietro di Donato, Joseph Entin argues that these artists drew attention to the country's most vulnerable residents by using what he calls an "aesthetic of astonishment," focused on startling, graphic images of pain, injury, and prejudice. Traditional portrayals of the poor depicted stoic, passive figures of sentimental suffering or degraded but potentially threatening figures in need of supervision. Sensational modernists sought to shock middle-class audiences into new ways of seeing the nation's impoverished and outcast populations. The striking images these artists created, often taking the form of contorted or disfigured bodies drawn from the realm of the tabloids, pulp magazines, and cinema, represented a bold, experimental form of social aesthetics. Entin argues that these artists created a willfully unorthodox brand of vernacular modernism in which formal avant-garde innovations were used to delineate the conditions, contradictions, and pressures of life on the nation's fringes.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Under what conditions does 'sensation' become 'sensational'? In the early nineteenth century murder was a staple of the sensationalizing popular press and gruesome descriptions were deployed to make a direct impact on the sensations of the reader. By the end of the century, public concern with the thrills, spills, and shocks of modern life was increasingly articulated in the language of sensation. Media sensationalism contributed to this process and magnified its impact, just as sensation was, in turn, taken up by literature, art and film. In the contemporary world the dramatization of these experiences in an era of media panics over terrorism and paedophilia has taken an overtly melodramatic form, in which battles of good and evil play out across the landscapes of our lives. Sensational Subjects develops an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to exploring these themes, their impact and their implications for understanding the modern world. A companion volume, Sympathetic Sentiments: Affect, Emotion and Spectacle in the Modern World is published simultaneously by Bloomsbury.

A captivating look at the origins of our own tabloid culture in the salacious and titillating media of the Victorian era.

Victorian sensation novels, with their compulsive plots of crime, transgression and mystery, were bestsellers. Deborah Wynne analyses the fascinating relationships between sensation novels and the magazines in which they were serialized. Drawing upon the work of Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, and Charles Reade, and such popular family journals as All The Year Round, The Cornhill, and Once a Week , the author highlights how novels and magazines worked together to engage in the major cultural and social debates of the period.

This comprehensive collection offers a complete introduction to one of the most popular literary forms of the Victorian period, its key authors and works, its major themes, and its lasting legacy. Places key authors and novels in their cultural and historical context Includes studies of major topics such as race, gender, melodrama, theatre, poetry, realism in fiction, and connections to other art forms Contributions from top international scholars approach an important literary genre from a range of perspectives Offers both a pre and post-history of the genre to situate it in the larger tradition of Victorian publishing and literature Incorporates coverage of traditional research and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship

Sensational Deviance: Disability in Nineteenth-Century Sensation Fiction investigates the representation of disability in fictional works by the leading Victorian sensation novelists Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, exploring how disability acts as a major element in the shaping of the sensation novel genre and how various sensation novels respond to traditional viewpoints of disability and to new developments in physiological and psychiatric knowledge. The depictions of disabled characters in sensation fiction frequently deviate strongly from typical depictions of disability in mainstream Victorian literature, undermining its stigmatized positioning as tragic deficit, severe limitation, or pathology. Close readings of nine individual novels situate their investigations of physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities against the period’s disability discourses and interest in senses, perception, stimuli, the nervous system, and the hereditability of impairments. The importance of moral insanity and degeneration theory within sensation fiction connect the genre with criminal anthropology, suggesting the genre’s further significance in the light of the later emergence of eugenics, psychoanalysis, and genetics.