ENG324Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Locked-Room Mystery, Wilkie Collins, Gothic Fiction
Document Summary
Close friends with charles dickens, whose acting company performed some of collins"s play. Several works serialized in all the year round; joined the staff in 1856. Developed an addiction to opium (center of the plot/plot is important to him) Many critics consider it the first detective novel. Multiple narrators are similar to an epistolary novel (a novel in letters) without free indirect discourse; integral to the surprise twist ending. Plot driven romance, gothic fiction, and victorian gothic. Can also be classified as sensation fiction . Mixes elements of the realist with the gothic. An emphasis on a suspenseful situation over other fictional elements (diamond). Plot driven mysteries which are full of criminal and ethically subversive acts, they also tend to feature somewhat thinly drawn, if eccentric, characters, and rich superficial detail. Plot devices invoke the foreign or exotic, but the formulaic sensation text is solidly english, involving respectable, middle class.
