Wilkie Collins Women Property And Propriety

Almost on the centenary of his death, this book studies the novels of Wilkie Collins and attempts to appreciate his representation of Victorian mores. It pays particular attention to Collins' views on sexuality, both male and female, and the laws concerning the distribution of property.

This eclectic collection brings together a range of critical voices, from varying disciplinary backgrounds, to comment on the life and works of Wilkie Collins. A close friend of Dickens, Collins engaged with some of the nineteenth century’s most influential ideas and cultural developments. As this collection makes clear, he formed interesting connections with key figures in literature, art, theatre, medicine, and the law. As a result, his works often engaged with the period’s most influential ideas and cultural developments. Best remembered for spearheading the Sensation genre with The Woman in White and detective fiction with The Moonstone, Collins’s career actually encompassed a large amount of material that has remained relatively neglected until recently. Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays offers readings of previously unstudied sources while offering new perspectives on the author’s most canonical works.

In this book the author examines how women detectives are portrayed in film, in literature and on TV. Chapters examine the portrayal of female investigators in each of these four genres: the Gothic novel, the lesbian detective novel, television and film.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the complete works of Wilkie Collins’s. Examining his vast array of novels and short stories, this volume includes analysis of the social, historical, and political commentary Collins offered within his works, illuminating Collins as more than a successful crime and sensation author, or the fortunate recipient of Dicken’s grand patronage, but as a hard-thinking and lively-writing part of the rich mid-Victorian literary scene. Overall, Collins is seen as a master of narratives which deal with social and personal issues that were much debated in his fifty-year authorial period. Close attention is paid to the events, themes, and characterization in his fiction, revealing his analytic vigor and the literary power of that period and context. Delivering fresh insight into the variety and richness of Collins’ themes and arguments, this volume provides a key source of information and analysis on all Collins’ fiction.

This book explores ideas of violent femininity across generic and disciplinary boundaries during the nineteenth century. It aims to highlight how medical, legal and literary narratives shared notions of the volatile nature of women. Mangham traces intersections between notorious legal trials, theories of female insanity, and sensation novels.

Wilkie Collins's classic thriller took the world by storm on its first appearance in 1859, with everything from dances to perfumes to dresses named in honor of the "woman in white." The novel's continuing fascination stems in part from a distinctive blend of melodrama, comedy, and realism; and in part from the power of its story. The catalyst for the mystery is Walter Hartright's encounter on a moonlit road with a mysterious woman dressed head to toe in white. She is in a state of confusion and distress, and when Hartright helps her find her way back to London she warns him against an unnamed "man of rank and title." Hartright soon learns that she may have escaped from an asylum and finds to his amazement that her story may be connected to that of the woman he secretly loves. Collins brilliantly uses the device of multiple narrators to weave a story in which no one can be trusted, and he also famously creates, in the figure of Count Fosco, the prototype of the suave, sophisticated evil genius. The Woman in White is still passed as a masterpiece of narrative drive and excruciating suspense. Introduction by Nicholas Rance

In the midst of a Victorian culture ingrained with strict social etiquette and societal norms, Wilkie Collins composed novels that contained asocial, even anarchic, impulses. A contemporary of Dickens, Collins creates a world more Kafkaesque than Dickensian, a world populated by doppelgangers, secret selves, oddballs, and grotesques. The essays of Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins purposefully work to expand Collins's legacy beyond The Woman in White and The Moonstone; they move well past the simplistic view of Collins's works as "sensation novels," "detective novels," or even "popular fiction," all labels that carry with them pejorative connotations. This collection represents the range of Collins's aesthetic project from various critical perspectives. New methodological and theoretical approaches are applied both to him most popular and to his lesser-known works, giving the reader a broader picture of this multifaceted and undervalued writer The Editors: Maria K. Bachman in an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Newsletter, Literature and Psychology, The Dickensian, and Dickens Studies Annual. Don Richard Cox is a professor of English and associate dean at the University of Tennessee. His books include Sexuality andVictorian Literature (Tennessee), Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood: An Annotated Bibliography. He is the coeditor, with Maria Bachman, of an edition of Wilkie Collins's final novel, Blind Love