In Lady Audley's Shadow : : Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres / / Saverio Tomaiuolo.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2013-2000
• VerfasserIn: Tomaiuolo, Saverio,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture : ECSVC
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (232 p.)

This book is devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's complex relationship with the three main Victorian literary genres: the Gothic, the Detective and the Realist novel. Using Braddon's bestselling sensation fiction Lady Audley's Secret as a paradigmatic novel and as a 'haunting' textual presence across her literary career, this study provides a fertile critical reading of a wide range of Braddon's novels and short stories. Through an analysis of Braddon's negotiations with Victorian narrative, ideological and cultural issues, this monograph offers readers a refreshing view of gender, female identity and subjectivity, the treatment of insanity, questions related to technology and progress, the impact of evolutionism and Darwinism, the intersemiotic dialogue between pictorial art and novel-writing, the role of the (female) writer in the new literary market and the changing notion of capital in an increasingly fluid social context.Braddon's manipulation of Victorian literary codes and conventions proves that she was something more than a mere sensation writer and that her primary role in the nineteenth-century literary scene has to be reaffirmed. Drawing on a wide range of textual materials and literary sources, the book foregrounds Braddon's constant and sometimes ambivalent dialogue with her times, and with ours as well.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Series Editor’s Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: the Lady Audley Paradigm -- Part I Gothic Mutations -- Chapter 1 Displacing the Gothic in Lady Audley’s Secret -- Chapter 2 John Marchmont’s Legacy and the Topologies of Dispossession -- Chapter 3 Reading between the (Blood)lines of Victorian Vampires: ‘Good Lady Ducayne’ -- Part II Darwinian Detections -- Chapter 4 From Geology to Genealogy: Detectives and Counter-detectives in Lady Audley’s Secret and Henry Dunbar -- Chapter 5 Perception, Abduction, Disability: Eleanor’s Victory and The Trail of the Serpent -- Chapter 6 John Faunce’s Normalising Investigations in Rough Justice and His Darling Sin -- Part III Victorian Realisms -- Chapter 7 ‘So Like and Yet So Unlike’: Reality Effects, Sensational Letters and Pre- Raphaelite Portraits in Lady Audley’s Secret -- Chapter 8 Reading Sensation/Writing Realism: Photographic Strategies in The Doctor’s Wife -- Chapter 9 ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air’: Phantom Fortune and the Ghosts of Capitalism -- Bibliography -- Index