Conclusion

This concluding chapter re-evaluates the opening example of Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean in light of the study’s findings. It ventures that the inconclusivity prominent at its ending is a defining feature of the genre and its training for the uncertainties of mid-century modernity. The Conclusion’s second part addresses how this polemical aim of sensation fiction should be read in the postmodern present. It highlights how the genre’s messaging resonates with, for instance, the response to endemic COVID-19, where ‘living with COVID’ seems to mean ‘living with uncertainty’. Yet, as the Conclusion’s final part considers, sensation fiction’s enduring faith in teleology—in progress towards an end—may be more positively interpreted in view of the crises of the present, which require action on a global scale.