Helena Ifill. Creating character: Theories of nature and nurture in Victorian sensation fiction; Heidi L. Pennington. Creating identity in the Victorian fictional autobiography

Abstract

The review discusses two monographs devoted to Victorian novels: H. Ifill’s work on the problem of character in sensation fiction and H. L. Pennington’s study of what shapes identity in an imaginary autobiography. Among the indisputable merits of Ifill’s book, which focuses on W. Collins’s and M. Braddon’s works, is the author’s attempt to consider Victorian novel as a holistic literary phenomenon beyond its chronological definition. Such an approach immediately removes the division into literary ranks and the opposition of realistic to sensation or social-criminal novel, etc. The scholar describes the essential genre characteristics of the texts, partially represented by the principles of character shaping. Pennington looks at C. Dickens’s and C. Brontë’s novels from the viewpoint of shaping of the protagonist’s identity in a genre born as a mixture of fiction and autobiography.