Description: Examines the fascination with identity fraud in sensation fiction and Victorian culture more broadly.
Brief description: Clayton Carlyle Tarr is Lecturer in English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Review Quotes:
"Personation Plots demonstrates a comprehensive grounding in nineteenth-century conceptions of identity, the self, and subjectivity, to say nothing of the requisite historical knowledge to write intelligently, as Tarr does, about things such as plastic surgery, transfusion, and the census. No less comprehensive is Tarr's knowledge of sensation fiction, from seminal texts like The Woman in White and Lady Audley's Secret to more obscure ones such as Blood, Checkmate, and Verner's Pride. Personation Plots is a unique and notable study, valuable not only for its key arguments but also for introducing readers to less familiar works by Le Fanu, Braddon, Reade, and others." - Sean C. Grass, author of The Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Autobiography, Sensation, and the Literary Marketplace