Sensation (fiction)

Sensation is the fiction-writing mode for portraying a character's perception of the senses. According to Ron Rozelle, “. . .the success of your story or novel will depend on many things, but the most crucial is your ability to bring your reader into it. And that reader will be most completely in when you deliver the actual sensations of the many things that comprise your story” (Rozelle 2005, p. 76). As stated by Jessica Page Morrell, “You breathe life into fiction by translating the senses onto the page, producing stories rooted in the physical world . . . that creates a tapestry, a galaxy of interwoven sensory ingredients.” (Morrell 2006, p. 172)

Also according to Rozelle, “The sensation of what something feels like is used to describe everything from sensual pleasure to pain and torture. It’s a wide range, and your readers have actually experienced only some of those feelings. So your job is to either make them recall exactly what it feels like when something occurs in your story or, if they haven’t experienced it, what it would feel like if they did” (Rozelle 2005, p. 86). Morrell describes a “sensory surround,” which when “coupled with drama tugs the reader into [the] story and forces him to keep reading.” (Morrell 2006, p. 173)

Sensation novel

The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, following on from earlier melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies. It also drew on the gothic and romantic genres of fiction. The sensation novel's appearance notably follows the Industrial Revolution, which made books available on a mass scale for people of all social standings and increased the sensation novel's popularity. Sensation novels used both modes of romance and realism to the extreme where in the past they had traditionally been contradictory modes of literature. The sensation novelists commonly wrote stories that were allegorical and abstract; the abstract nature of the stories gave the authors room to explore scenarios that wrestled with the social anxieties of the Victorian Era. The loss of identity is seen in many sensation fiction stories because this was a common social anxiety; in Britain, there was an increased use in record keeping and therefore people questioned the meaning and permanence of identity. The social anxiety regarding identity is reflected in stories, such as, The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret.