Part of the Authors in Context series within OWC, Wilkie Collins is a lively, accessible, and critically topical exploration of Collins`s novels in relation to the age in which he lived, and in modern contexts such as the stage and television.
The book has critically useful discussions of Collins`s major novels in relation to the law and criminality, especially the Victorian marriage and divorce laws, gender roles, the family, class and social mobility, empire and imperialism, and science and psychology.
Popularity of Collins`s novels, and sensation fiction, makes the book timely, and recent adaptations such as Lloyd Webber`s stage version of The Woman in White are discussed.
Includes a chronology of Wilkie Collins, further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.
Wilkie Collins is mainly remembered for his best-selling sensation novel The Woman in White and his detective mystery The Moonstone , both published in the 1860s. However, in a literary career spanning nearly forty years he wrote over twenty novels, several plays, and numerous short stories in which his preoccupations with Victorian society are revealed. Irregular liaisons, the chaotic state of the marriage laws, social and psychological identity, and the interconnections between respectable society and the world of crime are recurring themes in Collins`s fiction. Lyn Pykett looks at Collins`s long and varied career in relation to the changing circumstances of his own life, a changing literary marketplace, and the changing worlds of nineteenth-century Britain, as well as his enduring legacy for modern writers and interpreters.
The book includes a chronology of Collins`s life and times, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.
Readership: Students, from AS/A2 level upwards, of Collins, sensation fiction, nineteenth-century literature, gender studies, detective fiction, the Victorian novel