Sensation novel

The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, following on from earlier melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies. It also drew on the gothic and romantic genres of fiction. The sensation novel's appearance notably follows the Industrial Revolution, which made books available on a mass scale for people of all social standings and increased the sensation novel's popularity. Sensation novels used both modes of romance and realism to the extreme where in the past they had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature. The sensation novelists commonly wrote stories that were allegorical and abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties of the Victorian Era. The loss of identity is seen in many sensation fiction stories because this was a common social anxiety; in Britain, there was an increased use in record keeping and therefore people questioned the meaning and permanence of identity. The social anxiety regarding identity is reflected in stories, such as, The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret.