Wilkie Collins And Other Sensation Novelists

This work adopts a fresh approach by relating the vogue in the 1860s for sensation fiction to a specific phase of a crisis of faith in the bourgeois ideology of self-help. The demise of sensation fiction after a mere decade is then associated with a returned sense in the 1870s of the durability of the status quo, and the temporary revival of a moralism, which had seemed in a terminal condition in the 1860s.