Sensation Fiction and Modernity: The Meanings of Ambivalence in Mid-Victorian Britain

Acknowledgements
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
	‘The Modern Spirit’: Beyond ‘Shocks’ and ‘Thrills’
	‘Order Out of Chaos’: Testing Another Modernity
	References
Chapter 2: Dreams of Transparency: M. E. Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent
	‘Professed Induction’ or ‘Living Conviction’? The Uncertainties of Modern Visuality
	‘If We Could Look into His Heart’: Physiognomy, Phrenology, and Photography
	‘Like a Blank Wall’: The Limits to Transparency
	Seeing in the City: Urbanization, Tourism, and Criminality
	The View from the Stalls: Leisure, Surveillance, and Technology
	Conclusion
	References
Chapter 3: Repetitions of the Past: J. S. Le Fanu’s Wylder’s Hand
	‘The Rotten Foundations’: Inescapable Pasts in Ireland and England
	‘Doomed […] to Re-enact Itself’? Repeating and Resisting the Past
	‘The Days of Duelling Are Gone’: Anachronisms
	‘It Is True – A True Allegory, I Mean’: Uncanny Re-enactments
	‘It Will Not Stay Buried’: The Past Uncovered
	References
Chapter 4: Visions of Flux: Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well
	‘A Consideration of Inferior Moment’: Evolutionary Perspectives and the Individual
	‘The Desire for Complete Extinction’: Sexual Selection and the Marriage Plot
	‘Things Past, Present, and to Come’: Evolutionary Speculations in the Crystal Palace
	‘This Happy Trance’: Sensational Presents, Evolutionary Pasts
	Conclusion
	References
Chapter 5: Difficulties of Decision: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale
	The ‘Danger of Haste’ or the ‘Debility of Indecision’? Mid-Victorian Cultures of Doubt
	‘To Test […] by Time and Absence’: Confronting Uncertainty
	‘Over Credulity’ or ‘Ultra Scepticism’? Theorizing Dreams
	‘The Purpose of the Dream’: Reconciling with Doubt
	Conclusion
	References
Chapter 6: Conclusion
	References
Index