| Quite effectively, the essays
Mangham has commissioned represent the range and variety
of approaches that sensation inspires, very few of which
place authors and their works at the center. This Companion
surely creates for students (and their teachers) the
opportunity to understand sensation as a wide-ranging and
ongoing phenomenon, in which the representation of "the
mysteries which are at our own doors," in James's famous
phrase, could make strange even the most banal facets of
everyday life. The one thing missing from this otherwise
fine collection, in my view, is a companion piece to
Janice M. Allan's excellent essay on the contemporary
Victorian critical response to sensation fiction, an essay
that would do for current and future students, in much
greater detail, what I have tried to do here in brief.
Foregrounding the literary-critical history of sensation
over the last two generations--when and where it entered
into critical discussion, on what theoretical terms, under
what headings, and in whose interests--would surely help
to map the transformations within the broader field for
current and future scholars, for whom the shifting
cultural meanings of maniacs and madwomen might otherwise
remain illegible. Mary Jean Corbett, Review in Victorian Studies 58:4 (Summer 2016) |
|
| ...
The evidence
in fact points unmistakably towards the United States
as the source of the attributive use of 'sensation',
with the earliest instances found in the later 1850s
in notices of stage melodramas. The Oxford English
Dictionary finds its earliest example in an 1860
journal entry by Emilie Cowell, during her concert
tour of America, where at Cincinnati she attended a
'new "sensation Drama"' which she found 'full of
strong and immoral situations'. [Graham Law,
"Sensation Fiction and the Publishing Industry," 169,
citing a diary entry not published until 1934] Philip V. Allingham, Review on Victorian Web (2013) https://victorianweb.org/genre/reviews/allingham.html 'Crossing Lines; Blurring Boundaries: The Gender and Social Disruptions of Nineteenth-Century Sensation' |
|
| Eyal Segal, Review in Poetics Today 36:1-2
(2015) |
|
| J. Greg Matthews, Review in Reference Reviews 29:4 (2015) |