Sensationalism made real : the role of realism in the production of sensational affect

Allan, JM

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.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Feb 6, 2015
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Dec 16, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 5, 2016
• Journal: Victorian Literature and Culture
• Print ISSN: 1060-1503
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1553
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Volume: 43
• Issue: 01
• Pages: 97-112
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150314000369
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1060150314000369
• Related Public URLs: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=VLC