"The Serious Pleasures of Suspense argues that a startling array of nineteenth-century thinkers - from John Ruskin and Michael Faraday to Charlotte Bronte and Wilkie Collins - saw suspense as the perfect vehicle for a radically new approach to knowledge that they called "realism." Although by convention suspense has belonged to the realm of sensational mysteries and gothic horrors, and realism to the world of sober, reformist, middle-class domesticity, the two were in fact inextricably intertwined. The real was defined precisely as that which did not belong to the mind, that which stood separate from patterns of thought and belief. In order to get at the truth of the real, readers would have to learn to suspend their judgment. Suspenseful plots were the ideal vehicles for disseminating this experience of doubt, training readers to pause before leaping to conclusions."--Jacket.

Introduction -- Part I. Ruskin and the suspension of judgment -- 1. Ruskin's radical realism -- 2. Ruskin's plots. Modern Painters and The Moonstone -- Part II. The serious pleasures of suspense fiction: Brontë and Dickens -- 3. "Harmless pleasure." Gender, suspense, and Jane Eyre -- 4. Realism as self-forgetfulness. Gender, ethics, and Great Expectations -- Part III. George Eliot investigates -- 5. The gender of realism reconsidered in Adam Bede -- 6. Realist narrative in doubt. The Lifted Veil -- 7. The prophetic fallacy. Romola -- Part IV. Unraveling the rhetoric of suspense: James, Pater, and Wilde -- 8. Losing the plot. Henry James's "Travelling Companions" -- 9. Pater's plots. The Renaissance and The Picture of Dorian Gray.