ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Sensation fiction was a literary genre that achieved enormous popularity during the 1860s in Britain. The first and best known sensation novels were Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862).

Detailed explanation-2: -The sensation novel was and is sensational partly because of content: it deals with crime, often murder as an outcome of adultery and sometimes of bigamy, in apparently proper, bourgeois, domestic settings.

Detailed explanation-3: -The 18th century marked the period where novels were distributed on a large scale, and a certain level of demand arose among English readers. This demand is also due to people’s desire for reading about everyday events, events which went on to shape the lives and actions of fictional characters.

Detailed explanation-4: -18th-century novels. The idea of the “rise of the novel” in the 18th century is especially associated with Ian Watt’s influential study The Rise of the Novel (1957). In Watt’s conception, a rise in fictional realism during the 18th century came to distinguish the novel from earlier prose narratives.