123047 PS Proseminar Literature / Literary Studies (2015S)

When thinking of mid-19th-century British literature, a great number of renowned Realist authors comes to mind: George Eliot, Charles Dickens, The Brontë sisters, etc. However, hardly any student of English literature knows that besides the Realist tradition the mid-19th-century literary landscape of Great Britain was also characterised by another literary tradition, which deviated from the established Realist and moral standards, namely sensation fiction. Dedicated to “Harrowing the Mind, Making the Flesh Creep, Causing the Hair to Stand on End, Giving Shocks to the Nervous System, Destroying Conventional Moralities, and generally Unfitting the Public for the Prosaic Avocations of Life”, sensation fiction could boast of an incredibly large readership since its shocking and transgressive contents appealed to people from the upper and lower classes alike. But although a number of sensation novels rank among the most popular and bestselling novels of the entire 19th century, the genre was often (unjustly) dismissed too lightly as pulp fiction lacking any literary value. Indeed, the genre was only recently rediscovered by literary scholars and attempts at reassessment have been made. Therefore, this introductory seminar intends to make students familiar with a long-neglected genre and thereby show them how diversified the Victorian literary landscape actually was.