Loughborough University
Browse
EL_2_2_2015_006_AMB.pdf (156.38 kB)

«You’re obliged to have recourse to bodies» corporeal proliferation, class, and literary taste in M.E. Braddon’s Revision of The Outcasts

Download (156.38 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2016-03-16, 14:26 authored by Anne-Marie BellerAnne-Marie Beller
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 Literature

Volume

2

Issue

2

Pages

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, Italy

Version

  • 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

2015-09-14

Publication date

2015-12-31

Copyright date

2016

Notes

This article was published in the journal, English Literature [Edizioni Ca' Foscari]

ISSN

2385-1635

eISSN

2420-823X

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Licence

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC