The Bigamy Plot Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel McAleavey

The Bigamy PlotSensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel\nAuthor(s): Maia McAleavey\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9781107103160, 978-1107103160\nSynopsis\nThe courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Bront, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly .