Margaret Oliphant makes it clear that she finds the genre of sensation fiction to be dangerous. Oliphant illustrates the trend that sensation novelists often tend to elicit their thrills by depicting likable evil. Her concern is that the tools used in sensation fiction, in trying to make the book more interesting, are sending the wrong type of message to readers. Oliphant gives the example of a novel called “East Lynne”, \u00a0the protagonist of which is a woman who commits adults adultery against her husband. By developing interest in a character by adding elements of indecency or immorality to their nature, there is an inherent vulnerability in the reader to feel sympathy or even to relate to the motivations of the character. Oliphant picks at this tendency of the reader, and she further suggests that authors of the sensation fiction genre are corrupting the minds of the public by means of adding validity to acts of crime and other inscrutable behavior. She calls this type of literature “dangerous and foolish work, as well as false, both to Art and Nature.” This type of criticism is similar to that of Ruth Graham in that they both attempt to convince us that certain types of literature are detrimental to the reader. Much like how Graham suggests that young adult fiction threatens to create a class of readers who shamelessly neglect their obligations to fine literature, Oliphant suggests that sensation fiction threatens to compromise the integrity of the reader by slowly warping their sense of morality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Margaret Oliphant makes it clear that she finds the genre of sensation fiction to be dangerous. Oliphant illustrates the trend that sensation novelists often tend to elicit their thrills by depicting likable evil. Her concern is that the tools used in sensation fiction, in trying…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":881,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/881"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":394,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388\/revisions\/394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/guiltypleasures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}