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 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. In their frequent representations of identity fraud, sensation writers demonstrated that the body could never guarantee a person's identity. The sensation genre, which enjoyed remarkable popularity in the 1860s and 1870s, at once reflected and challenged this discourse. The mid-nineteenth century was marked by extensive medico-legal efforts to understand the body as the sole signifier of identity. The first full-length study of identity fraud in literature, Personation Plots argues that concerns about identity and the body gripped the Victorian consciousness.
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