LITERATURE QUESTIONS
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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Women were often the heroines, and this helped the cause of New Woman suffragettes.
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The genre highlighted architecture and ancient history, the supernatural and the sublime.
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It served the interests of the government by distracting the public from scandals of state.
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The genre employed a rigorous realism that catered to a contemporary “taste for the factual” while it nonetheless titillated the public appetite for the exotic and renewed interest in the science of the mind.
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Detailed explanation-1: -The genre derived its name from the contemporary theater’s “sensation drama” noted for spectacular effects and displays of intense emotion. Sensation fiction drew on a variety of popular forms including melodrama, domestic realism, newspaper reports, Newgate novels, and gothic tales.
Detailed explanation-2: -One of the aims of sensation fiction was to surprise and trouble readers by challenging social conventions, but another Victorian genre, melodrama, achieved popularity by upholding popular values.
Detailed explanation-3: -Themes and reception. Typically the sensation novel focused on shocking subject matter including adultery, theft, kidnapping, insanity, bigamy, forgery, seduction and murder.
Detailed explanation-4: -Sensation novels play on the nerves and thrill the senses. Matthew Sweet considers some of the key features of the genre, as well as its three founding texts, all published in the 1860s: The Woman in White, Lady Audley’s Secret and East Lynne.