Narrative, Affect and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies

Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies argues 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 thus 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, the book 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.

Tara MacDonald is Associate Professor and Chair of English at the University of Idaho, USA. She is the author of The New Man, Masculinity, and Marriage in the Victorian Novel (2015), co-editor, with Anne-Marie Beller, of Rediscovering Victorian Women Sensation Writers (2014). She has published numerous articles and book chapters on Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction.