Over the last thirty years or so, sensation fiction has shaken off its scandalous roots to become a respectable area of academic study. The transformation began with the publication of Winifred Hughes's The Maniac in the Cellar (Reference Hughes1980) and Patrick Brantlinger's “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” (Reference Brantlinger1982), and gathered pace in the 1980s and 90s through the contributions of Ann Cvetkovich, Pamela Gilbert, D. A. Miller, Lyn Pykett, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. One of the results of all this scholarly interest is that the genre has begun to attract more introductory works that concentrate on consolidating what others have said. Ideas that were once considered new or controversial are now seen as common knowledge: we know that sensation fiction involves more than the influential novels written in the 1860s by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins; we are familiar with the frequent blurring between sensation fiction and other genres (including crime fiction and the gothic); we are well schooled in interdisciplinary approaches that read sensation fiction alongside science, psychology, and law; and we are used to competing claims for sensation fiction as a subversive or conservative genre. With so much attention being given to a collection of writings once described by Hughes as “irretrievably minor” (167) and by Brantlinger as “a minor subgenre of British fiction” (1), one could be forgiven for thinking that there are few secrets left to be uncovered. Yet, as the wide array of books considered here attests, the critical appeal of sensation fiction and Victorian crime shows no sign of abating. If anything, the first few years of the twenty-first century have seen even greater levels of interest: a number of Victorian Studies conferences have chosen sensation as their theme, and the genre features regularly in the pages of academic journals. Given that the extent of our ongoing fascination would probably have shocked a previous generation of scholars, this review of recent critical trends will try and figure out why the genre possesses such a powerful hold on our thinking and whether or not this hold is likely to continue.

I am not the first critic to have something to say about the attraction of Victorian sensation. Michael Diamond's enjoyable introduction to the subject, Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Reference Diamond2003), uses “human nature” (6) to explain our ongoing interest in a range of sensational events, from sexual scandal to celebrity culture. The appeal to human nature usefully reminds us of our own predilection for sensation; at the same time, it risks ignoring the historical and theoretical complexity of Victorian reading (in all its plurality). Recognising the need for critics to employ a more precise vocabulary and reflect on their own reading practices as they read the Victorians, Anna Maria Jones argues in Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorises the Sensation Self (Reference Jones2007) that literary critics who write about the sensation novel frequently replicate the realist-sensation divide of the nineteenth-century, writing “themselves into the role of the detective who has discovered a [sensational] crime” (8). Jones shows how critics locate themselves as enlightened investigators and silently employ the sensationalizing techniques they claim to expose. Even well theorised critics, such as Miller and Cvetkovich, “track the novels’ secrets, revealing them to their readers clue by significant clue, offering a sensational payoff for those who follow their narratives to conclusion” (8). The thesis that Jones offers is astute and compelling, yielding intelligent readings of work by Collins, John Ruskin, Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, and George Meredith. Rather than thinking that the double standard of literary criticism is intrinsic to the human condition, Jones sees it as a legacy of the nineteenth-century privileging of realism and the crucial role that this played in the formation of literary criticism as a professional discipline. Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Henry James (among others) were not above incorporating sensational elements into their work, and contemporary critics have a similar tendency for playing down their reliance on the techniques that they take pride in being able to explain.

The nuanced, self-reflexive criticism practiced by Jones is helpful for understanding the trajectories of current research on sensation fiction. Victorianists may remain fascinated by techniques that Henry Mansel once described as “preaching to the nerves” (482), but there are signs that the excitement has started to fade. When Margaret Oliphant looked back on the novels of Collins, in the second volume of The Victorian Age of English Literature (Reference Oliphant1892), she observed: “To be led among those often alarming, always cleverly contrived mazes, and to trace the thread of story in and out, was the entertainment he offered to his public. Nothing excites a more lively or keen interest, but unfortunately nothing palls more upon the excited imagination” (188). Oliphant's reading reflects prejudices from the period and ignores the qualities that others have since identified in Collins's writing; nevertheless, her remarks grasp something of the way in which sensation involves a law of diminishing returns, whereby new sensations elicit less response than those experienced previously. The declining excitement among readers is one of the many factors behind the decline of sensation fiction in the late nineteenth century – as Hughes puts it, “what had scandalized the mid-Victorians merely looked quaint to their successors” (189). In our own day, the critical reliance on shocking accounts of poisoning and adultery to promote the cause of sensation fiction finds itself in a similar predicament. My point is not that we have moved beyond sensation, nor do I wish to claim that scholars are no longer fascinated by dramatic incident; rather, I am suggesting that the use of certain sensational themes to attract the attention of readers has become a tired strategy. The problem is evident in Andrew Mangham's recent work, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (Reference Mangham2007). Although the book is carefully researched and methodologically more ambitious than my reference to it here might suggest, the focus on violence and female criminality does not command the same interest that it might have done ten or twenty years ago. A similar problem with over-familiarity emerges in the co-authored book by Natalie Schroeder and Ronald A. Schroeder, From Sensation to Society: Representations of Marriage in the Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, 1862–1866 (Reference Schroeder and Schroeder2006). Braddon's life and work may contain all the elements for an engaging story, but critics who have grown used to reading about marriage and divorce in sensational fiction and criticism are unlikely to muster much enthusiasm for a title like this.

One of the ways in which literary critics have traditionally re-energised interest in a subject is by recovering forgotten texts. Since the emergence of sensation fiction as a major area of study, there has been less reliance on the more canonical works by Collins and Braddon. Novels such as Lady Audley's Secret (1862) continue to attract a great deal of comment, as one would expect, but there has been significant interest in other books by Braddon and Collins, with the latter's full oeuvre being well represented in three recent edited collections: Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins (2003), edited by Maria Bachman and Don Cox; The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins (2006), edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor; and Wilkie Collins: Interdisciplinary Essays (2007), edited by Andrew Mangham. Other sensation novels have also received plenty of attention: the edited collection by Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina, Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre (2006), which includes chapters on Rhoda Broughton's Not Wisely But Too Well (1867) and Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt (1866), offers a good example of the spread of work being undertaken in the field, as does the edited collection by Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation (2004).

In spite of the widespread availability of electronic resources, printed scholarly editions continue to play an important role in shaping most people's understanding of the sensation novel. The works produced by older publishers such as Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics (including, in recent years, Ellen Wood's East Lynne and Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas) are influential, as are the nineteenth-century novels (with accompanying critical material) produced by Broadview Press. In addition to popular sensation novels by Braddon, Collins, Dickens, and Wood, Broadview Press's books include Charlotte Yonge's The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), edited by Clare Simmons, and Ouida's Moths (1880), edited by Natalie Schroeder. Restoring some of these novels to our notion of the sensation novel exposes our limited and often skewed understanding of the period, forcing us to question the generic boundaries we are working with. As the novels by Yonge and Ouida remind us, it is not always clear where the boundaries of sensation fiction begin and end. Questions of genre are brought to the foreground in Pickering and Chatto's six-volume set, Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction (2004), edited by Andrew Maunder (along with a team of individual volume editors: Tamar Heller, Mark Knight, Graham Law, Lillian Nayder, and Lyn Pykett). The editorial team consider a range of material, from what they call newspaper sensationalism to what they refer to as erotic sensationalism. Some of the authors they reprint are relatively familiar to those working in the field; others, such as Mary Cecil Hay, are largely unknown. Hay's Old Myddelton's Money (1874) may not match the narrative excitement of The Woman in White (1860), but it does encourage us to take seriously the Victorian “army of novelists” (Oliphant 190) as we think about the sensation novel.

The large number of sensation novels produced in the nineteenth century presents major methodological difficulties for those who want to make claims about the genre and its cultural significance. Faced with these difficulties and aware of the futility of trying to isolate a limited number of nineteenth-century texts from the material culture in which they appeared, several scholars have turned their attention to aspects of nineteenth-century print culture. The additional material may place further demands on the researcher, but it provides some relief from the task of wading through one long novel after another and helps to focus attention on the question of methodology. Following his seminal book on newspaper novels, Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press (2000), Graham Law has continued to tell us a great deal about the publishing history of Collins, arguably the most famous of all the sensation writers. Law's work as one of the editors of The Public Face of Wilkie Collins: The Collected Letters (4 vols., 2005) has helped uncover important material relating to issues of copyright and the changing forms of publication in the nineteenth century, and the benefits of this can be seen throughout Graham Law and Andrew Maunder's recent study, Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life (2008). While Law stands out for his work on the print culture of sensation fiction, he is not the only critic working in this area. Deborah Wynne's The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine (Reference Wynne2001) offers a persuasive reading of Victorian periodicals as “sites of simultaneity” (20), in which sensation novels existed in a set of intertextual relations with other articles, illustrations, and advertisements. A similar engagement with elements of print culture informs a number of the essays in Mangham's edited collection and the thoughtful essay by Dallas Liddle in the edited collection by Maunder and Moore. Recognition of the significant role played by periodicals also shapes recent work on crime fiction, with Heather Worthington drawing heavily on journals such as Blackwood's and Household Words in her book, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (2005). Elsewhere, Martin Kayman's contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (edited by Martin Priestman, Reference Priestman2003) tells us that: “The connection between the magazine as a medium for the detective story and for the modern culture of consumption is often thematised both in the crucial role played by the railway and telegraph systems themselves and in the presence of (usually false or entrapping) adverts, fraudulent commercial or financial schemes, and retail theft” (43). And one can hardly make mention of the print culture surrounding crime and sensation fiction without referring to the scholarship – including notable contributions from Jennifer Phegley (Reference Phegley2005), Julia Chavez (Reference Chavez2007), and Christopher Pittard (Reference Pittard2007) – in the journal, Victorian Periodicals Review.

The interest of scholars in print culture and the commercial currents of nineteenth-century life extend to every area of Victorian literature; however, sensation fiction has been particularly prone to this sort of analysis, partly, perhaps, because the novelists who wrote such fiction were more willing than some of their peers to own up to the financial aspect of their trade. There is a danger that socio-economic analysis can quickly lose interest in the specificity of the text, erasing a key element of literary studies and replacing it with a less textually-dependent mode of cultural analysis. Yet, as the best critics continually remind us; socio-economic literary analysis does not have to be done at the expense of the text. Combining wonderful close readings with extensive reading of nineteenth-century economic theory, Catherine Gallagher turns her attention to the subject of nineteenth-century political economy in The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Reference Gallagher2006). With characteristic intellectual dexterity and authority, Gallagher “trace[s] a development in which political economists and their Romantic and early Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of ultimate value from a realm of transcendent spiritual meanings to organic ‘Life’ itself and made human sensations – especially pleasure and pain – the sources and signs of that value” (3). Gallagher goes on to show how novels written by those who spoke negatively about political economy were full of the insights of political economy. In different ways, Dickens and Eliot offer prime examples of novelists who were more heavily influenced by political economy than they cared to admit. Introducing the difficulties that the latter had in writing her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), Gallagher notes that “beneath that fear of rendering her consumers insensible through overproduction, there lurked another fantasy featuring readers who were yet more perverse than the mere overconsumers. This class of readers, Eliot imagines, are sensible of the repetitiousness of the literature they purchase, and they even discern degradations in the quality of the product, and yet they continue to buy it out of what Eliot calls ‘a habit of consumption’” (120). Gallagher proceeds to argue that Eliot's “fear of overwriting became an overwritten novel” (120). It is a convincing argument, one that reminds us how easy it is to be caught up in the very ideas that we claim detachment from.

Gallagher's willingness to engage with nineteenth-century political economy is a logical extension of the widespread interest among current literary scholars in the market forces of the Victorian period. Back in the 1990s, Cvetkovich and Gilbert were at the forefront of research linking sensation fiction to issues of gender, consumption, and the body. More recently, others have followed in their footsteps and examined some of the economies circulating in the sensation novel. Exemplifying this sort of approach is Laurence Talairach-Vielmas. In the introductory chapter of her book, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (2007), she explains: “The glimpses of commodity culture, which inform the Victorian fairy tales and fantasies analyzed in the first part of this study, become vital to the plots of sensation novels in which most of the female characters fabricate new identities” (11). Although the connection between the genres of fairy tale and sensation fiction is not entirely convincing, Talairach-Vielmas has some discerning things to say about the material she considers. Her readings offer sharp theoretical insights into the relationship between commerce and gender, and when she turns her attention to sensation fiction in the second half of the book, chapters range from the preoccupation with images of beauty in Bleak House (1853) to the significance of shopping and cosmetics in No Name (1862).

Though it might be a little harsh to put it this way, the fashions of contemporary criticism are open to the same critique that the anonymous narrator in Bleak House levels against the “world of fashion”: “There is much good in it. . . . But the evil of it is, that it . . . cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds. . . . It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air” (55). Like the consumers depicted by Dickens, all literary critics find it easier to buy into readings that reflect current scholarly fashions than to imagine new critical paradigms. Despite the range of ideas that turn up in criticism on the sensation novel, many essays show several signs of uniformity, and self-reflexive readers can never rid themselves of the fear that forces beyond themselves are determining the object of their attention. While suspicions of this sort are rooted in the work of several theorists, it is Michel Foucault who frames the most influential analysis of the way that modern society disciplines the individuals within its grasp. Highlighting the influence of Foucault on criticism of sensation fiction may seem rather ironic, given his scepticism about agency and the individual subject, but it is difficult to overestimate the importance of a thinker whose disciplinary thesis makes its way into so many studies of sensation fiction. The apparent omnipresence of Foucault within our critical discourse owes much to the publication of Miller's The Novel and the Police (Reference Miller1988), a deservedly influential book that insists on the ways in which the disciplinary reaches of society extend to our reading of the sensation novel. Since the publication of Miller's work, it has been difficult for critics to escape the panopticon of Foucauldian thought. The difficulty can be seen in Simon Joyce's articulate and attentive study, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (2003). Joyce seeks to emphasize his distance from Foucault by telling us that “the cultural representations of the police and the private detective are far less triumphant, and far more conflicted, than Foucault and his followers would allow” (229). Yet Jones is right to observe that Joyce “uses Foucault (and Miller as his proxy) as the fixed points around and against which to draw his ‘reading formations’” (9); the legacy of Foucault may not be as dominant in Joyce's work as it is elsewhere, but it is still present.

Although “suspicious” of the extent to which the disciplinary paradigm overshadows our reading of sensation fiction – a “suspicion” that signals my own exposure to such criticism – I am aware that Foucault has helped to reveal a great deal about the genre. Among other things, his insights sharpen our awareness of the connections between sensation fiction and crime fiction. These connections find expression in a variety of settings, from the works of Dickens to the newgate novel, a genre that Lyn Pykett situates helpfully in her contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Crime and sensation converge continually in critical work, with examples including the title of the edited collection by Maunder and Moore, the section on sensation in Stephen Knight's book, Crime Fiction 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity (2004) and, more immediately, the focus of this review essay. In all cases the debt to Foucault is hard to miss, but it is particularly explicit in the well-researched study by Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction. Worthington shows how literature played a pivotal role in convincing the middle classes that the emerging police force was a necessary ally in the struggle against subversive social elements. Policing was “disseminated, then, as now, via a number of media: the newspapers, educational texts, religious tracts, and the periodical press. Literature of all kinds was, and is, an ideal locus for the transmission of ideology” (68). Where Worthington differs from Miller and Foucault is in her willingness to fill in the historical details carefully, rather than relying on a small number of dramatic examples. Her study makes good use of periodical material from the first half of the century and offers an informative read.

Studies of Victorian crime and sensation frequently coalesce around the work of Collins, with The Moonstone (1868) providing an obvious focus for scholars. By situating the missing diamond within a broader nexus of criminality and empire, the narrative lends support to Foucault's later insistence on the interconnections among all expressions of discipline and power. Among the several critics who have turned their attention to The Moonstone's account of the crimes of the British Empire are Ronald R. Thomas (see his essay in The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction), Lillian Nayder (see chapter 6 of Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Victorian Authorship, Reference Nayder2002), and Caroline Reitz. In Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (2004), Reitz shows us that “what The Moonstone illustrates, as a definitive English detective novel, is that the tradition of detective fiction is by no means a domestic genre” (56). Convincingly, Reitz reads the development of the detective genre in conjunction with the development of the British Empire. While Reitz is not the first person to discuss the interplay between crime, policing, and empire in Collins's novel, her sustained investigation into the relationship between detection abroad and at home is illuminating: “The lesson of Detecting the Nation is that the demands of an imperial world called the English detective reluctantly into being but that in detecting that imperial nation he made the Empire part of what it meant to be English in the Victorian period” (81).

In spite of Reitz's reference to the “lesson” of her book, her work is not narrowly didactic; the strong line of argument that runs throughout does not close down new avenues of thought, and her discussion remains open to other ways of thinking. A lesson is a starting point for further reflection rather than an end in itself, and neither polemic nor instruction has to result in complete subjugation. Realizing this has consequences for our view of other forms that were common in the Victorian period, such as the sermon, as well as for our reading of the religious discourse that permeates many of the nineteenth-century debates about the sensation novel. Over the last few years, the recognition that a hermeneutics of suspicion is not the only way of responding to theology has encouraged scholars to revisit the subject of Victorian religion. As they have done so, they have appreciated the rich vocabulary that religious discourse provides for thinking about a range of phenomena, including sensation. Reading sensation fiction with a theological lens does not necessitate a radical departure from previous schools of thought, a point that becomes apparent when we turn our attention to Patrick O'Malley's Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Reference O'Malley2006) and Maureen Moran's Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Reference Moran2007). O'Malley's sharp and perceptive book explores the intersections among gothic literature, sexuality, nationality, and religion. While his generic interests are centred on the gothic rather than sensation fiction, the latter is prominent in an impressive chapter on Lady Audley's Secret. Arguing that Braddon's novel marks “a transposition of the Gothic – in the aftermath of the Oxford Movement and the ‘Papal Aggression’ – to the realm of English domesticity” (104), O'Malley uncovers a set of anxieties concerning the perceived threat to British national identity posed by homoeroticism and foreign Catholicism. Although British Protestants shared Foucault's later concern about the abuse of power emanating from Rome, the marginal status of Catholicism in nineteenth-century Britain complicated the narratives that were written to process and interrogate this concern.

My description of Catholicism as marginal to the religious life of nineteenth-century Britain is not intended to play down the historical significance of this part of the church. Though less powerful in Britain than Protestantism, Catholicism exerted considerable influence, a point that is apparent throughout Moran's detailed and informative study. Approaching the subject of sensation more broadly than O'Malley, Moran uses sensationalism as “a particular mode through which Roman Catholicism was constructed in the period.” As she goes on to explain: “The ‘sensationalizing’ of the Church of Rome dramatizes the many and interrelated understandings of ‘sensation’ that haunted the period: its indication of the mysterious connection between body, nerves and mind; its emphasis on extremes of emotion (and language); its association with the shocking, unorthodox and countercultural” (2–3). On occasion, the danger of combining such an expansive understanding of sensationalism with another subject (i.e., Catholicism) becomes apparent; for the most part, however, the range of material in Moran's study is one of its strengths, with good discussions of writers such as Charles Kingsley, Grace Aguilar, and Mary Ward.

The studies by O'Malley and Moran concentrate on the links between sensationalism and Catholicism, but sensationalism also permeated a great deal of Protestant discourse, as some of the anti-Catholic tirades considered by the two critics make clear. According to Moran, accounts of Protestant conversion were less sensational than their Catholic counterparts: “The most spectacular conversion traumas in the period are undoubtedly found in Protestant representations of conversion to Catholicism. Unlike Evangelical ‘great change’ narratives where a personal turning to God is often legitimated by material success as well as a new spiritual confidence, these accounts depict conversion to Catholicism as a socially transgressive act” (182–83). While it is not difficult to find evidence to support this claim, several nineteenth-century accounts of Protestant conversion displayed little restraint and, consequently, were seen as transgressive. Echoes of the enthusiastic language of the Methodists could be heard throughout the century. The characters that loomed large in British Protestantism included ministers of religion, such as Edward Irving, who made extensive use of dramatic expressions of feeling in their preaching and practice. Towards the end of the Victorian period, the Salvation Army became notorious for its reliance on sensation as a means of attracting attention. Discussed briefly in Mark Knight and Emma Mason's Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006) and Diamond's Victorian Sensation, the disreputable sensationalism of the Salvation Army is considered at length by Pamela J. Walker in Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Reference Walker2001). Among the many things we learn from Walker's research is the willingness with which the Salvation Army embraced elements of modernity; from the perspective of this Protestant denomination, at least, religious belief was compatible with the sensational New Journalism promoted by W. T. Stead.

For a significant group of scholars, sensation's link with modernity shifts the focus away from narrowly thematic readings of the genre to more theorised accounts that interpret the sensation novel in conjunction with other manifestations of modernity. The shift is one of the main reasons for the increasing number of readings that link sensation novels to areas such as physical affect and the visual. This shift does not always have to involve a decisive break from earlier criticism – the lucid chapter on The Woman in White in Rachael Ablow's The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Reference Ablow2007), for instance, follows a tradition of writing about nineteenth-century psychology and literature that stretches back to the work of Miller and Taylor in the late 1980s – but the rethinking of sensation in terms commonly associated with writing about modernity is unmistakeable. Equally apparent is the influence of Walter Benjamin, one of the great theorists of modernity, on current thinking about sensation fiction. The debt is explicit in William McKelvy's “The Woman in White and Graphic Sex,” an essay that identifies itself as part of a larger study of the literary representation of aesthetic reproduction. Despite the fact that McKelvy takes issue with Benjamin's essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the influence of the theorist on McKelvy's thought remains clear, illustrating the significant resources that Benjamin's reading of modernity makes available to contemporary scholarship, as well as offering one genealogical explanation of why literary scholars should be so keen to link the verbal and the visual.

The sensation critic who has made the most far-reaching use of the conceptual resources provided by Benjamin's work on modernity is Nicholas Daly. In Literature, Technology and Modernity, 1860–2000 (Reference Daly2004), Daly considers the contribution of literature to the “mechanization of everyday life,” arguing that “form, whether that of the sensation novel or of the sensation drama, is itself brought up to speed, which in turn means that the reading or viewing process comes to makes some of the same demands as the industrial task” (3). Acknowledging the problems with finding a place for human agency amid the mechanization of culture, Daly explores a series of artistic responses to aspects of modern technology, beginning with the railway, which functioned as both “agent and icon of modernization” (20). Earlier critics have noted the recurring presence of the railway within sensational literature of the mid-nineteenth century but Daly advances a more specific thesis, with wide-ranging implications. Having argued that the railway rescues depicted in melodramas of the period sought to “put modernity on stage in an attempt to localize it and thus escape it,” he goes on to show how sensation fiction differed by providing “a species of temporal training” (37), implicating readers in the modernisation of the senses by making automated physical responses a normative part of the reading process. The result, Daly insists, is that “what the sensation novel was preaching to the nerves was a new time-discipline: to be immersed in the plot of a sensation novel, to have one's nerves quiver with those of the hero or heroine, was to be wired into a new mode of temporality. Time consciousness would be recast as pleasurable suspense” (49).

Throughout his engaging and persuasive book, Daly aims to treat cultural texts as being “about their culture” rather than “simply a mirror of it”: “The first position holds out possibilities of resistance and agency, if not transcendence; the latter, deriving at least proximally from New Historicism, seems to confine the text to a sort of prison-house of culture” (3). Though Daly is generally successful in keeping texts away from the prison-house of culture, it is noticeable that the chapter dealing specifically with the sensation novel finds less resistance and agency in this genre than in other cultural texts. Daly deems the sensation novel noteworthy chiefly for the way in which it “synchronizes its readers with industrial modernity” (37). The implication is that the sensation novel is more compliant than other cultural texts, a position that leads us to back to the question of why we find the genre so fascinating. If it is the case, as Foucault and Miller insist, that the sensation novel requires analysis because of the way in which it disciplines our behaviour, then there seems to be comparatively little left to say about a genre that has been extensively mapped over the last twenty-five years. But if sensation novels figure narratives and ideas in ways that are culturally distinct and “resistant,” then our increased familiarity with the broad contours of the genre presents no barrier to further research. The sensational productions of Braddon, Collins, and others fascinate our critical imaginations for many reasons. Interpreting the genre requires us to think about our own cultural politics as well as those of the Victorian period, but as the work detailed here makes clear, there is something about individual sensation novels that lies beneath the surface, frustrating our best efforts at playing the detective and figuring it all out.