Teaching Genre: The Sensation Novel

Abstract

Over the past decade, studies of sensation fiction have flourished, due in large part to the foundational work of Anne Cvetkovich, Pamela K. Gilbert, Winifred Hughes, Lyn Pykett, Elaine Showalter, and others who wrote about the genre in the 1980s and 90s. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a wide variety of publications have been devoted to sensationalism making it a bourgeoning trend in current literary scholarship.¹ Andrew Maunder accounts for this increasing scholarly interest in a formerly marginalized genre by suggesting that “It is now acknowledged that if sensation fiction is cut out of the picture it is impossible to gain an accurate sense of nineteenth-century literary historiography …. Sensation fiction and the critical furore it provoked is now seen as a key event … enriching our understanding of Victorian fiction generally” (2004, p. xii). However, the reprinting of sensation novels themselves has not kept up with this surge in critical attention. As a result, classroom integration of sensation fiction has necessarily lagged behind academic research on the genre, just as its movement into the canon has progressed more slowly than critical interest. In this essay, I will investigate how sensation fiction is currently being used in college classrooms and to what extent it can be considered newly canonical. As I follow Maunder’s lead in making a case for the importance of the genre, I hope to suggest some productive ways these novels can be incorporated into our current curricula despite the somewhat limited availability of texts.