Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction: Between Optimism Pessimism

Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction: Between Optimism and Pessimism explores how Victorian sensation fiction grappled with the defining tensions of its age and the competing visions of optimism and pessimism they created. Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction: Between Optimism and Pessimism explores how Victorian sensation fiction grappled with the defining tensions of its age – faith in advancement and fear of decline, belief in free will and the weight of deterministic forces – and the competing visions of optimism and pessimism they created. By examining the genre’s engagement with a wide range of discourses that fed these debates – adaptation, nature and nurture, sexual selection and fate and free will – it reveals sensation fiction as a critical space where the pressing intellectual questions of the Victorian era were not only reflected but actively shaped. Analysing both canonical and neglected texts – Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866), Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867) and James Payn’s Bred in the Bone (1871) – the book demonstrates that sensation fiction, despite emerging during a period of growing pessimism, retained an optimistic belief in human perfectibility and the capacity for self-determination. Its dual structure bridges rigorous intellectual history with close readings of the four novels. This book will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary readership, including scholars of Victorian (popular) fiction and researchers of the history of science, medicine and ideas.