Twin sisters”
Intermediality and sensation in Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12154657 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Beth Palmer (0000-0001-7485-3813, University of Surrey, corresponding author), Joanna Hofer-Robinson (0000-0003-2262-5506, University College Cork) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2019-12-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Nineteenth Century Contexts (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0890-5495 • E-ISSN: 1477-2663 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/08905495.2019.1686934 |
| OpenAlex | W2939997830 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
Dion Boucicault's The Colleen Bawn (1860) is typically considered a foundational text for the dramatic genre of sensation. 1 The famous "sensation scene," in which Myles na Coppaleen dives into a lake to save the heroine from drowning, began a trend to foreground elaborate, "specialeffects-driven" climaxes as the primary attraction for theatregoers (Daly 2009, 3).Boucicault continued to use sensation scenes to draw in audiences over the next two decades.For instance, Arrah-na-Pogue, which opened in London in 1865, includes a death-defying jail-break, in which the hero scales an ivy-covered tower.This emphasis on stagecraft as a vehicle to shock and amaze audiences indicates that sensation dramas offered a form of escapism which defied the mundane or quotidian.Unlike concurrently popular sensation novels, which titillated readers by suggesting that illicit secrets were concealed in respectable, bourgeois homes, sensation dramas were concerned to represent extraordinary scenes.So, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862) exposes cases of bigamy and attempted murder in leafy, modern-day Essex, her drama The Missing Witness (1874) is based in Switzerland and culminates with a spectacular avalanche.Different though sensation dramas and novels appear to be on first glance, their promised visceral affect for audiences and readers is very much aligned.Both sought to elicit physical reactions, such as shocks, starts, and a racing pulse by creating an immersive experience.In this sense, as Lynn Voskuil long-since argued, the emphasis sensation dramas placed on bodily responses paradoxically "located authenticity at the very heart of the theatrical experience" (2004, 64).Voskuil examines how the sensational affect -otherwise, these felt responses -was produced by the concurrent realism and spectacle of the stagecraft.Theatres ensured the dramatic effectiveness of their productions by investing in up-to-the-minute stage technologies to create convincing special effects.Nevertheless, she argues that the success of the scenes to stimulate bodily reactions also depended on the audience's complicity, by choosing to suspend their disbelief.However "realistic" the stagecraft was, audiences still knew they were in a theatre.Readers of sensation novels similarly chose to suspend their disbelief simultaneously to
Art · Art history · Cognitive psychology · Psychoanalysis · Sensation · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Psychology · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |