William Russell, Wilkie Collins e la costruzione del poliziesco vittoriano. La professionalizzazione dell’indagine e la trasformazione narrativa di un genere


Abstract


This article examines the contributions of William Russell and Wilkie Collins to the emergence of sensation fiction, a hybrid genre that anticipated key thematic and formal features of the Victorian detective novel. Through a comparative reading of “Legal Metamorphoses” and “The Biter Bit”, it highlights the shift from a normative, professionalised model of detection to one increasingly entangled with desire, narrative instability, and cultural anxiety. The figure of the investigator becomes a site of negotiation between authority and vulnerability, reflecting broader mid-nineteenth-century concerns about morality and institutional power. Rather than tracing a single point of origin, the article situates sensation fiction within a diffuse cultural and literary transition already underway in the 1850s.

Keywords: William Russell; Wilkie Collins; romanzo sensazionale; protopoliziesco; detection novel

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