The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins

by Edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor

• ISBN13: 9780521840385
• ISBN10: 0521840384
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-12-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known for The Woman in White, which inaugurated the sensation novel in the 1860s, and The Moonstone, one of the first detective novels; but he wrote over 20 novels, plays and short stories during a career that spanned four decades. This Companion offers a fascinating overview of Collins's writing. In a wide range of essays by leading scholars, it traces the development of his career, his position as a writer and his complex relation to contemporary cultural movements and debates. Collins's exploration of the tensions which lay beneath Victorian society is analysed through a variety of critical approaches. A chronology and guide to further reading are provided, making this book an indispensable guide for all those interested in Wilkie Collins and his work.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Collins's career and the

The early writing

Collins's shorter fiction

Collins and the sensation novel

The Moonstone, detective fiction and forensic science

The later novels

The professional writer and the literary marketplace Graham Law

The marriage plot and its alternatives

Collins and Victorian masculinity

Collins and empire

Difference and disability

Collins and theatre

The afterlife of Wilkie

Guide to further reading

Index

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