Chapter 7 - The Post-sensational Seventies

Summary

Genealogically rooted in the Gothic, melodrama, and prose romance of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, sensationalism proliferated and even intensified throughout the 1870s as authors sought new forms of emotional and visceral connection with their increasingly desensitized readers. This essay recovers this somewhat more knowing second decade as the ‘post-sensational seventies,’ wherein the ‘post’ is understood in the same way that it might be if conjoined within other more familiar compounds, such as ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post-feminist,’ not as beyond a phenomenon that is past but rather as grappling self-consciously with the legacies, internal contradictions, possibilities, and pervasiveness of a set of practices that are still very much present. Ultimately, recognizing the 1870s as post-sensational means acknowledging that novelistic representations shifted decisively to accommodate the coincidental, the criminal, the nonrational, and the scandalous, as well as structurally resistant forms of gender and class, as constituent fractions of the real.