This selection of eleven essays charts the most important aspects of the developing debate about Collins's fiction in the last twenty years. Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches - including reader response theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural materialism and a range of feminisms - these essays examine Collins's fiction from several perspectives: historical, psychological, structural, generic and political (including gender politics). They focus on an author preoccupied with the production of social and psychological identity, and with issues of class, gender and power. If there is a single issue which permeates this collection, it is the question of the subversiveness of Collins's fiction or, alternatively, its retreat from and/or containment of a radical social critique or subversive impulses. The pros and cons of this debate are explored further in Lyn Pykett's detailed and wide-ranging introduction.
Wilkie Collins' work has enjoyed a recent critical renaissance and is widely studied at undergraduate and A Level
Selected 'landmark' essays reflect the lively polemic of critical debate on this author's work in the last years
Lyn Pykett
detective fiction fiction novel Renaissance Victorian era British and Irish Literature