The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s. Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne was the first novel to be critically dubbed "sensational" and begun a trend whose main exponents were Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White", The Moonstone), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret) and most of Mrs Henry Wood's later fiction. A literary genre is one of the divisions of literature into genres according to particular criteria such as literary technique, tone, or subject matter (content). ... // Events and trends Technology The First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States is built in the six year period between 1863 and 1869. ... // Events and Trends Technology The invention of the telephone (1876) by Alexander Graham Bell. ... East Lynne is a novel of 1861 by Mrs. ... Wilkie Collins William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and writer of short stories. ... The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins and published in 1859. ... The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language. ... Mary Elizabeth Braddon British novelist (1837 – 1915) Mary Elizabeth Braddon (October 4, 1837 – February 4, 1915) was a British Victorian era popular novelist. ... Lady Audleys Secret is a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, written in 1862. ...
Typically the Sensation Novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder. It distinguished itself from other contemporary genres including the Gothic Novel by setting these themes in familiar and often domestic settings, thereby undermining the common Victorian assumption that sensational events were something foreign and divorced from comfortable middle-class life. Strawberry Hill, an English villa in the Gothic revival style, built by seminal Gothic writer Horace Walpole The gothic novel was a literary genre that belonged to Romanticism and began in the United Kingdom with The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole. ...
The term “sensationnovel” was in fact in use in Britain as the novels to which it was applied were being written.
The characters in sensation fiction (both male and female) tend to be highly neurotic: they weep, become chilled or flushed, hyperventilate, faint, and swoon with startling frequency and ease.
In this regard, the sensationnovel is also similar to the sentimental mode in realist fiction: like the narrative voice in Oliver Twist, the sensationnovel encourages its reader to participate, if only vicariously, in the emotional heights and depths of its characters.
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