The Reliability of Sensational Interpretation

In this essay, I observe that scholarly attention towards sensation fiction has heavily relied on historicist readings while overlooking sensation fiction's status as a properly aesthetic phenomenon that immanently theorizes the act of novel reading. I argue that the absorbed reading that is commonly assumed to attend a sensation novel like Lady Audley's Secret (1862) is, paradoxically, sustained by the novel's self-consciously mediative qualities that hold the reader at bay from identification and immersion, instead of plunging her into sensational immediacy. What makes sensation fiction so gratifyingly readable is not the thrills of narrative suspense, but the reliability of the conventions by which it has been read over and again.