'"Deeds of darkness": Thomas Hardy and murder'

Critics have often sought to place Thomas Hardy’s fiction within a realist generic framework, with a significant emphasis on Hardy’s Wessex settings, visual imagination and equation of sight with knowledge. Yet Hardy’s writings frequently disturb realist generic conventions by introducing elements from popular nineteenth-century genres, particularly sensation fiction and the Gothic. This essay considers how murder as a plot device troubles generic boundaries in the novels Desperate Remedies (1871), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). Set against backgrounds with significant non-realist elements, these texts view murder and its punishment from limited, distorted or averted perspectives that articulate a significant social and cultural critique

Sensationalism made real : the role of realism in the production of sensational affect

Like all complicated relationships, that between realism and sensationalism has been subject to a good deal of rumour and speculation. In what might be described as the pair's first critical encounter – in an 1852 joint review of W. M. Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond and Wilkie Collins's proto-sensation novel Basil – a critic for Bentley's Miscellany intimates that a partnership between two such different forms is anything but likely. “We have,” he explains, “put these two books ‘over against’ each other, to use one of Mr. Thackeray's favourite Queen-Anne-isms, because they have no kind of family resemblance. They are, indeed, as unlike each other as any two books can be. They constitute a kind of literary antithesis” (“Esmond” 576). The inherently contradictory nature of this originary “over against” gesture – conflating proximity and distance, contiguity and difference – sets the keynote for subsequent discussions, contemporaneous and current, of a generic relationship that continues to attract and elude definition

The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1990)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the Victorian Group of Modern Language Association by the Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.Pensée Sauvage at the MLA: Victorian Cultural Imperialism Then and Now / Patrick Brantlinger -- The Power of the Word: Scientific Nomenclature and the Spread of Empire / Harriet Ritvo -- The Anti-Comedy of The Trumpet Major / Richard Nemesvari -- Behind "Golden Barriers": Framing and Taming the Blessed Damozel / Andrew Leng -- Scenes of Marital Life: The Middle March of Extratextual Reading / Monica L. Feinberg -- "The Coronation of the Whirlwind": The Victorian Poetics of Indeterminacy / Lawrence J. Starzyk -- The Dover Switch, Or the New Sexism at "Dover Beach" / Eugene R. August -- Books Receive