Introduction

This introductory chapter considers first how the study of sensation fiction and modernity has narrowly conceived of that term, centring these novels’ depiction of nervous bodies and how those bodies are affected by technology and urbanity. It afterwards proposes that an alternate, ‘cultural discontinuity’ sense of modernity may be applied to help explain several curious features of the genre and reveal the crucial relevance of hitherto neglected contexts. Drawing particularly on Zygmunt Bauman’s theorizing of modernity as a struggle against ambivalence and Caroline Levine’s work on epistemological training through suspense, the Introduction contends that these novels prepared readers for the increasingly complex and uncertain world that was being produced through modernization. By proposing a polemical function to these novels, which is evidenced through the chapters that follow, the book thereby broaches a new understanding of the genre’s socio-political impetus, with implications for the study of other popular genres.