Articles liés à Personation Plots: Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation...

Personation Plots: Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation Fiction - Couverture rigide

Livre 26 sur 30: SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Tarr, Clayton Carlyle

 
9781438490830: Personation Plots: Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation Fiction

Synopsis

Examines the fascination with identity fraud in sensation fiction and Victorian culture more broadly.

The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.

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À propos de l'auteur

Clayton Carlyle Tarr is Lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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