Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction

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.