The afterlife of Wilkie Collins.

An examination of the various adaptations of Wilkie Collins's novels from early silent film through the classic teatime serial to contemporary television and sensation fiction. The chapter traces the media and reading relations that shaped Collins's fiction (including drama, magazine publication and reading aloud). This initial context, implicitly shaped by horizons of the publishable, reveals important continuities between the reception contexts of the serial novel, early film and the classic serial. Contemporary novelistic accounts of Collins and sensation fiction – however stylistically close – are, by contrast, markedly differently in the reading practices they propose.