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«You’re obliged to have recourse to bodies» corporeal proliferation, class, and literary taste in M.E. Braddon’s Revision of The Outcasts
The sensation novel was frequently criticised for its corporeality and vulgar depictions
of physical violence. M.E. Braddon was identified as a prime offender in this respect, yet Braddon’s
anonymous writing for the penny fiction market displays considerably more explicit emphasis on
corporeality than any of her relatively restrained three-volume novels. In contrast to her middleclass
novels, where, as her character Sigismund Smith advises, the emphasis should all be on
«one body», Braddon’s penny bloods proliferate bodies, in the dual sense of corpses (referred to
by Smith in my title) and also through extensive casts of characters and multiple plot-lines. An
analysis of the revisions Braddon made to her penny serial The Outcasts before its publication
in 3 volumes as Henry Dunbar elucidates mid-Victorian perceptions of the «vulgarization» of taste
and the «classed» nature of genres. Bourdieu’s theory of «impure taste» is employed to assess the
ways in which Braddon’s treatment of «bodies» engages questions of literary taste and negotiates
the different generic conventions operating between the penny serial and the 3-volume novel.
History
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
English LiteratureVolume
2Issue
2Pages
275 - 289 (14)Citation
BELLER, A., 2016.«You’re obliged to have recourse to bodies» corporeal proliferation, class, and literary taste in M.E. Braddon’s Revision of The Outcasts. English Literature, 2 (2), pp. 275 - 289.Publisher
Edizioni Ca'Foscari, ItalyVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-09-14Publication date
2015-12-31Copyright date
2016Notes
This article was published in the journal, English Literature [Edizioni Ca' Foscari]ISSN
2385-1635eISSN
2420-823XPublisher version
Language
- en