Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2006, English (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation argues that nineteenth-century sensation fiction evoked a cultural revolution that threatened to challenge accepted norms for personal behavior and increase possibilities for scripting one's life outside of established norms for respectable behavior. Because of the ways that it threatened to represent new scripts for personal behavior, sensation, which I term a “dangerous alternative social text,” disrupted hegemony and provided new ways of thinking amongst its Victorian British readership; it became a vehicle through which the law and government (public discourses) ended up colliding with domesticity and the very private texts surrounding it. Using an expanded definition of sensation, this project analyzes four “sensational” novels from the mid- to late Victorian period – Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Margaret Oliphant's Salem Chapel, Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamondsand Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray– and connects it chapter-by-chapter to concerns about cultural revolution evoked by the passage of the Infant Custody Acts, the 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act, the Married Women's Property Acts and the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. It also argues that the laws these novels engage additionally served as dangerous alternative social texts for personal behavior to the Establishment which attempted to bar their passing. It short, the project reads both the laws and listed novels as versions of sensation. Both sensation fiction and sensational laws legitimized new “dangerous” patterns for behavior and threatened possible changes in the “social text” of England.

Committee: Joseph McLaughlin (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, English