Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins

by Bachman, Maria K.; Cox, Don Richard

• ISBN13: 9781572332744
• ISBN10: 1572332743
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Tennessee Pr

Summary

In the midst of a Victorian culture ingrained with strict social etiquette and societal norms, Wilkie Collins composed novels that contained asocial, even anarchic, impulses. A contemporary of Dickens, Collins creates a world more Kafkaesque than Dickensian, a world populated by doppelgangers, secret selves, oddballs, and grotesques. The essays of Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collinspurposefully work to expand Collins's legacy beyond The Woman in Whiteand The Moonstone; they move well past the simplistic view of Collins's works as "sensation novels," "detective novels," or even "popular fiction," all labels that carry with them pejorative connotations. This collection represents the range of Collins's aesthetic project from various critical perspectives. New methodological and theoretical approaches are applied both to him most popular and to his lesser-known works, giving the reader a broader picture of this multifaceted and undervalued writer The Editors: Maria K. Bachman in an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her articles have appeared inVictorian Newsletter, Literature and Psychology, The Dickensian, andDickens Studies Annual. Don Richard Cox is a professor of English and associate dean at the University of Tennessee. His books includeSexuality andVictorian Literature (Tennessee),Arthur Conan Doyle , andCharles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood:An Annotated Bibliography . He is the coeditor, with Maria Bachman, of an edition of Wilkie Collins's final novel,Blind Love

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction The Real Wilkie Collins	xi
Maria K. Bachman
Don Richard Cox
Fatal Newness
Basil, Art, and the Origins of Sensation Fiction	1	(33)
Tim Dolin
Lucy Dougan
Framed and Hung
Collins and the Economic Beauty of the Manly Artist	34	(25)
Dennis Denisoff
``Bolder with Her Lover in the Dark''
Collins and Disabled Women's Sexuality	59	(35)
Martha Stoddard Holmes
Chemical Seductions
Exoticism, Toxicology, and the Female Poisoner in Armadale and The Legacy of Cain	94	(37)
Piya Pal-Lapinski
Marian's Moustache
Bearded Ladies, Hermaphrodites, and Intersexual Collage in The Woman in White	131	(42)
Richard Collins
The Crystal Palace, Imperialism, and the ``Struggle for Existence''
Victorian Evolutionary Discourse in Collins's The Woman in White	173	(22)
Gabrielle Ceraldi
Fosco Lives!	195	(44)
A. D. Hutter
Outlandish English Subjects in The Moonstone	239	(74)
Timothy L. Carens
``Blue Like Me''
Collins, Poor Miss Finch, and the Construction of Racial Identity	266	(17)
Lillian Nayder
Plain Faces, Weird Cases
Domesticating the Law in Collins's The Law and the Lady and the Trial of Madeleine Smith	283	(30)
Karin Jacobson
Collins, Race, and Slavery	313	(58)
Audrey Fisch
Yesterday's Sensations
Modes of Publication and Narrative Form in Collins's Late Novels	329	(32)
Graham Law
Afterword Masterpiece Theatre and Ezra Jennings's Hair
Some Reflections on Where We've Been and Where We're Going in Collins Studies	361	(10)
Tamar Heller
Contributors	371	(4)
Index	375