Wilkie Collins
Collins, Wilkie - (William Wilkie Collins), 1824–89, English novelist. Although trained as a lawyer, he spent most of his life writing, producing some 30 novels. He is best known for two mystery stories, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which are considered the first full-length detective novels in English and among the best of their genre; they helped to define the Read More...
Collins, Wilkie - (William Wilkie Collins), 1824–89, English novelist. Although trained as a lawyer, he spent most of his life writing, producing some 30 novels. He is best known for two mystery stories, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which are considered the first full-length detective novels in English and among the best of their genre; they helped to define the genre of literary melodrama which would peak at the end of the century. Collins's heroines are drawn with considerable clarity and sympathy. He was a friend of Dickens, in whose periodical Household Words many of Collins's novels first appeared. See W. Baker and W. M. Clarke, ed., The Letters of Wilkie Collins (Vol. I–II;, 2000); biographies by W. M. Clarke (1988) and C. Peters (1993); studies by M. P. Davis (1956), W. H. Marshall (1970), N. Page (1974), and S. Lonoff (1982). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
Wilkie Collins
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The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.
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Detection & Its Designs: Narrative & Power in 19th-Century Detective Fiction (Chap. Four "The Detection of Innocence in The Moonstone")
by Peter Thoms. 182 pgs.
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. Detection and Its Designs reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past and script a narrative of the crime.In readings of Godwin's Caleb Williams, Poe's Dupin stories, Dickens's Bleak House, Collins's The Moonstone, and Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Thorns argues that the detective's figurative writing emerges out of a desire to exert control over others and sometimes over himself.
Detection and Its Designs demonstrates that, far from being a naive form, early detective fiction grapples with the medium of storytelling itself. To pursue these inward-turning fictions is to uncover the detective's motives of controlling the representation of both himself and others, a discovery that in turn significantly undermines the authority of his solutions.
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Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865 (Chap. 6 "The Woman in White, Great Expectations, and The Limits of Medicine")
by Helen Small. 266 pgs.
Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. The book centers around studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of previously neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others.
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The Eighteen-Sixties: Essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (1932) ("The Early Novels of Wilkie Collins" begins on p. 51)
by John Drinkwater. 282 pgs.
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The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Includes discussion of Wilkie Collins in multiple chapters)
by John Sutherland. 749 pgs.
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A Companion to the Victorian Novel ("Victorian Detective Fiction" begins on p. 177, and "Wilkie Collins's Challenges to Pre-Raphaelite Gender Constructs" begins on p. 365)
by William Baker, Kenneth Womack. 445 pgs.
This reference is an introductory guide to the Victorian novel and its contexts. It examines the emergence of the Victorian novel and its literary precursors, with particular emphasis on serialization and syndication; it looks at significant social and cultural contexts surrounding the novel; it discusses various genres, such as ghost stories, the Gothic, and detective fiction; it introduces some of the period's most important novelists; and it surveys different critical approaches and their application to the study of 19th-century fiction.
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The History of the Novel in England (1932) ("William Wilkie Collins (1824-89)" begins on p. 250)
by Robert Morss Lovett, Helen Sard Hughes. 498 pgs.
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Cyclopedia of World Authors (1958) ("Wilkie Collins" begins on p. 227)
by Frank N. Magill, Dayton Kohler. 1204 pgs.
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Criticism and the Nineteenth Century (Chap. IX "Wilkie Collins's 'No Name'")
by Geoffrey Tillotson. 283 pgs.
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The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Chap. Two "Competitive Elites in Wilkie Collins: Cultural Intellectuals and Their Professional Others")
by John Kucich. 289 pgs.
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A mystery of unrelenting suspense and penetrating characterization, The Dead Secret explores the relationship between a fallen woman, her illegitimate daughter, and buried secrets in a superb blend of romance and Gothic drama. Reprinted here in the only critical edition available, is the text of the first edition, including Collins's preface and revisions. A superb introduction relates the text to Collins's love of the theatre, and previous and subsequent works.
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