Personation Plots: Identity Fraud in Victorian Sensation Fiction

The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The body is malleable and untrustworthy, and the identity it is supposed to signify is governed by the caprices of the human mind and the growing authority of paper matter. Both a wide-ranging literary analysis and a portrait of the age, Personation Plots reads canonical texts by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charles Dickens alongside several lesser-known sensation novels. The study, which anticipates debates over biometric identification practices in our own time, also features brief criminal biographies of two of the nineteenth century's greatest impostors, Alice Grey and Mary Jane Furneaux, and concludes with an afterword on imposture in the late-Victorian Gothic.

Author: Clayton Carlyle Tarr
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 05/02/2023
Pages: 266
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9781438490847
ISBN10: 1438490844
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Literary Criticism | Modern | 19th Century
- Literary Criticism | Gothic & Romance

About the Author
Clayton Carlyle Tarr is Lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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