9 - Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel

Summary

By the late 1970s it seemed to have become a universally acknowledged truth that the typical form of the nineteenth-century English novel was the “classic realist text,” a conservative literary form concerned to reinscribe a commonsense view of things as they are, whose formal and ideological characteristics were adumbrated (and frequently castigated) by a host of critics bent on a radical critique of literature and its institutions. This account of the hegemony of realism in the Victorian novel has been interrogated by critics with varying theoretical and political preoccupations who have explored the non-realist or anti-realist aspects of canonical Victorian novels, or redirected literary historical attention to the cultural significance of a range of bestselling and sometimes controversial nineteenth- century fiction texts such as the sensation novel of the 1860s and a number of fantastic narratives from the fin-de-siècle which do not conform to the tenets of “classic” “bourgeois” realism, and which have tended, hitherto, to be pushed to the margins of literary critical attention, or treated as aberrant.