A01=Helena Ifill
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Author_Helena Ifill
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSA
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
COP=United Kingdom
Degeneration
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Education
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Heredity
Insanity
Language_English
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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Price_€20 to €50
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Responsibility
Self-Determinism
Sensation novels
softlaunch
Wilkie Collins
Willpower
Product details
- ISBN 9781526171818
- Weight: 286g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2023
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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This book explores the ways in which the two leading sensation authors of the 1860s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins, engaged with nineteenth-century ideas about personality formation and the extent to which it can be influenced either by the subject or by others. Innovative readings of seven sensation novels explore how they employ and challenge Victorian theories of heredity, degeneration, inherent constitution, education, upbringing and social circumstance. Far from presenting a reductive depiction of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, Braddon and Collins show the creation of character to be a complex interplay of internal and external factors. Drawing on material ranging from medical textbooks, to sociological treatises, to popular periodicals, Creating character shows how sensation authors situated themselves at the intersections of established and developing, conservative and radical, learned and sensationalist thought about how identity could be made and modified.
Helena Ifill is a Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen
