In the first book centering on the collaborative relationship between Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Lillian Nayder places their coauthored works in the context of the Victorian publishing industry and shows how their fiction and drama represent and reconfigure their sometimes strained relationship. She challenges the widely accepted image of Dickens as a mentor of younger writers such as Collins, points to the ways in which Dickens controlled and profited from his literary "satellites," and charts Collins's development as an increasingly significant and independent author. The pair's collaborations for Household Words and All the Year Round explicitly addressed Victorian labor disputes and political unrest, and Nayder reads the stories in terms of the social and imperial conflicts that both provided their themes and enabled Dickens and Collins to mediate their own personal and professional differences. Nayder's discussion of the collaboration and its principals is greatly enriched by archival research into unpublished and unfamiliar material, including the manuscripts of The Frozen Deep.

The editors have transcribed 2,500 of Wilkie Collins's letters, around 700 of them previously unidentified, and have given them all a full scholarly annotation and context. The letters shed light on the personal life and business activities of this creative Victorian personality.

Dissenters and Mavericks reinvigorates the interdisciplinary study of literature, history, and politics through an approach to reading that allows the voices heard in writing a chance to talk back, to exert pressure on the presuppositions and preferences of a wide range of readers. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts--from colonial writers such as Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke to twentieth-century Indian writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and Pankaj Mishra--the book proposes a controversial challenge to prevailing academic methodology in the field of postcolonial studies.

This clearly written and wide-ranging study identifies the main features of the sensation novel, analysing its broader cultural significance as well as looking at it in its specific cultural context.