Angol
In the midst of a Victorian culture ingrained with strict social etiquette and societal norms, Wilkie Collins composed novels that contained asocial, even anarchic, impulses. A contemporary of Dickens, Collins creates a world more Kafkaesque than Dickensian, a world populated by doppelganger, secret selves, oddballs, and grotesques. The essays of "Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins purposefully work to expand Collins's legacy beyond "The Woman in White and "The Moonstone; they move well past the simplistic view of Collins's works as "sensation novels," "detective novels," or even "popular fiction," all labels that carry with them pejorative connotations. This collection represents the range of Collins's aesthetic project from various critical perspectives. New methodological and theoretical approaches are applied both to his most popular and to his lesser-known works, giving the reader a broader picture of this multifaceted and undervalued writer.
