Personation Plots : Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation Fiction (Suny series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Tarr, Clayton Carlyle

State University of New York Press（2022/11発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 266 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9781438490830
• DDC分類 823.809

Full Description

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.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I. Body

1. Skins to Jump Into
Clothes in A Woman in Spite of Herself
Cosmetics in No Name

2. Altered beyond Chance of Recognition
Surgery in Checkmate
Blood Transfusion in Blood

First Interlude: Alice Grey

Part II. Mind

3. That Lost Personality
Madness in Lady Audley's Secret
Epilepsy in Thou Art the Man

4. This Unclean Spirit of Imitation
Mesmerism in The Notting Hill Mystery
Opium in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Second Interlude: Mary Jane Furneaux

Part III. Matter

5. A Daring Imposture
Registers in The Woman in White
Wills in Verner's Pride

6. That Mysterious Paper Currency
Refuse in Our Mutual Friend
Photographs in Unconventional

Afterword: Reverse Personation

Notes
Works Cited
Index