Free standard shipping on all orders
  • Visa
  • Master Card
  • American Express
  • Apple Pay
  • Google Pay
  • JCB

Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction: Between Optimism and Pessimism book cover

1st Edition

Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction Between Optimism and Pessimism

By Sarah Frühwirth Copyright 2027
248 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

Introduction

Part I – Progress, Determinism and Agency: The Intellectual Context

1. Between Evolution and Extinction: Nineteenth-Century Theories of Adaptation and Maladaptation

2. Between Nature and Nurture: Heredity, Environment and Education in Victorian Thought

3. Between Passion and Prudence: Victorian Discourses of Sexual Selection and Reproduction

4. Between Redemption and Resignation: Victorian Perspectives on Destiny, Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Part II – Progress, Determinism and Agency: Victorian Sensation Novels

5. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)

6. Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1866)

7. Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)

8. James Payn’s Bred in the Bone; Or, Like Father, Like Son (1871)

Conclusion

Biography

Sarah Frühwirth is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Add to Cart