Progress, Determinism and Agency in Victorian Sensation Fiction: Between Optimism and Pessimism (Among the Victorians and Modernists)

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 pessi