Edited by Jennifer Phegley, John Cyril Barton, and Kristin
N. Huston. Featuring a preface by David S. Reynolds. Ashgate Press, 2012.
Bringing together sensation writing and transatlantic
studies, this collection makes a convincing case for the symbiotic relationship
between literary works on both sides of the Atlantic. Transatlantic Sensations
begins with the 'prehistories' of the genre, looking at the dialogue and debate
generated by the publication of sentimental and gothic fiction by William
Godwin, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown.Thus establishing a context
for the treatment of works by Louisa May Alcott, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Dion
Boucicault, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, George Lippard, Charles
Reade, Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Thompson, the volume takes up a wide
range of sensational topics including sexuality, slavery, criminal punishment,
literary piracy, mesmerism, and the metaphors of foreign literary invasion and
diseased reading. Concluding essays offer a reassessment of the realist and
domestic fiction of George Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Thomas Hardy in the
context of transatlantic sensationalism, emphasizing the evolution of the genre
throughout the century and mapping a new transatlantic lineage for this
immensely popular literary form. The book's final essay examines an
international kidnapping case that was a journalistic sensation at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Purchase from Ashgate.
