Narrative, Affect and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies

Argues that Victorian sensation novels theorise the transmission of affect via bodies and narratives This study puts forward the case that Victorian sensation novels - long dismissed as plot-driven, silly and feminine - develop complex theories of narrative affect, our embodied responses to reading, imagining and even writing a narrative. The popular sensation novel therefore should be understood as a key contribution to the novel's assessment of its own workings, especially the ways in which reading and writing figure as affective acts. Additionally, MacDonald radically expands the field of sensation fiction, taking seriously lesser-known female authors and reading them alongside a range of writers not typically considered sensational. These novels insist that feelings are not bound to a single body and that bodies generate meaning when they are put in relation to other bodies and systems of knowledge. Narrative, Affect and Victorian Sensation thus positions the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century popular fiction more generally, as vital to the history of feeling. Tara MacDonald is Associate Professor and Chair of English at the University of Idaho, USA. Her publications include The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (2015) and Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers: Beyond Braddon (2014).