This unit considers the 19th-century fascination with narratives of scandal, transgression, criminality, and irrationality, referred to as narratives of “sensation”. The unit may cover genres like the gothic, colonial adventure fiction, detective fiction, and the “sensation novel”, and the appearance of these genres in “respectable” realist fiction of the period, as well as extracts from texts like penny dreadfuls and advertisements, and biological, criminological, imperial, moral, or feminist texts. Providing an introduction to the literary and cultural history of the century, and introducing key writers, the unit asks why readers were fascinated by sensation narratives, and what these narratives tell us about the dreams and anxieties of 19th-century society.