This book re-reads the relationship between the Victorian sensation novel and modernity. Whereas critics have long recognized its appearance in the form of nervous subjects and technologically-enabled mobility, Green contends that modernity appears equally in sensation fiction in the form of intellectual and moral discontinuity. Through closely historicist readings of novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, as well as by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Rhoda Broughton, this book traces how discontinuity is manifested in the suspenseful plotting of these fictions, through which readers are challenged to revise conventional assumptions about the world and adopt more contingent perspectives. Deploying such a sense of modernity, so this study demonstrates, does not merely uncover the genre's engagements with a variety of mid-century contexts hitherto neglected within criticism. More fundamentally, it broaches a new sense of the function and significance of sensation fiction: the acclimatization of its readers to the discontinuities of modern existence.

  • “Green's Sensation Fiction and Modernity provides an innovative and sophisticated approach to re-conceptualizing how sensation novels function. By constructing the experience of modernity through disruptive temporality, the monograph moves responses to sensational narratives away from simplistic readings emphasizing only scandalous behaviour and sensory reader response. Instead, its carefully contextualized analysis of four texts (some canonical, some not), successfully demonstrates how sensationalism trained its audience to confront the shifting ambiguities of cultural discontinuity.”

    Richard Nemesvari, Professor of English, Wilfrid Laurier University

  • “In this well-contextualized and elegantly argued book, Green addresses the oft-discussed relationship between Victorian sensation novels and modernity, but whereas former critics have focused on speed, technology and the reading body, Green gives us a different Victorian modernity: one focused on discontinuity, hesitation, and moral and intellectual uncertainty. Reading visuality through Braddon, inheritance and commerce through LeFanu, evolution and heritability through Broughton, and the importance of hesitation and uncertainty through Collins, Green shows how discontinuity and disruption are crucial to sensation fiction's suspenseful plots, but also their epistemological disruptions. Green thus offers a new and important perspective on a range of sensation authors and texts.”

    Pamela K. Gilbert, Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida

  • “Through rich and detailed readings, Green corrects the relatively narrow interpretation of modernity that has shaped criticism on the genre thus far. His book convincingly relocates sensation fiction into a wide range of previously unconsidered (or rarely considered) contexts – from pseudo-science to evolutionary science, and urban tourism to Anglo-Irish ideas of inheritance – providing us with new and compelling ways to conceptualise 1860s sensationalism.”

    Anne-Marie Beller, Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature, Loughborough University

Other Writing

  • · Sensation Fiction and Modernity: The Meanings of Ambivalence in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

    · (Under Contract) Fictions of Radical Life Extension: Living Forever from the Fin de Siècle to the First World War (Bloomsbury Academic).

  • · ‘“Lest the Night Carry on Forever”: The Transcendent Gothic Unconscious in Bloodborne’, in Carol Margaret Davison (ed.), Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (Manchester UP, 2024)

    · ‘After Death to T. S. Eliot’, in William Baker and Richard Nemesvari (eds), Wilkie Collins in Context (Cambridge UP, 2023).

    · ‘Contemporary’, in William Baker and Richard Nemesvari (eds), Wilkie Collins in Context (Cambridge UP, 2023).

  • · ‘“You Belong to My Time, Not His”: Ageing, Queerness, and 'Allotted Time' in E. Nesbit's Dormant’, Women’s Writing, 31.2 (2024), 254-272.

    · ‘“Old Things Made New”: Transfusive Rejuvenescence in M. E. Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne” and H. G. Wells’s “The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham”’, Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 9.1 (2023), 35–53. DOI: 10.1515/fns-2023-2004

    · “Short-Spanned Living Creatures”: Evolutionary Perspectives in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)’, JVC, 26.2 (2021), 212–226, DOI: 10.1093/jvcult/vcaa040

    · ‘“Aren’t you Maria?”: The Uncanny and the Gothic in Silent Hill 2’, Gothic Studies, 23.1 (2021), 1–20. DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2021.0075

    · ‘Seeing in the City: Modern Visuality in M. E. Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860)’, Victorian Network, 9 (2020), 80–100. DOI: 10.5283/vn.106

  • · ‘Evolution and Sensation Fiction’, in Lesa Scholl (ed.), Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Victorian Women’s Writing. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_368-1