Tara MacDonald, Director, Centre for Feminist Research, Won VPFA Book Prize!
Our very own Professor in English and WGST, Tara MacDonald, was the winner of the 2024 Victorian Popular Fiction Association (VPFA) Second Book Prize for Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation: Wilful Bodies (Edinburgh UP, 2023) She received a £200 cash prize and was honoured at the AGM of the VPFA Annual Conference at the Birmingham and Midlands Institute in July 2025.
The judging panel, Professors Anne-Marie Beller, Kate Newey and Jennifer Phegley, offered the following feedback:
Narrative, Affect, and Victorian Sensation is an exciting and impressive new approach to sensation fiction. The book is well-written and engaging in its readings of popular novels and criticism of those novels when they were first published and today….Its intellectual scope and reach is invigorating and compelling, particularly in its use of previous scholarship, which scaffolds the author’s quite original approach. This book offers a fresh and original take on ideas of sensational feeling and reading, with a central solid focus on popular fiction, and a challenging theoretical and critical framework….It combines detailed knowledge of intellectual trends of the period, with a sophisticated theoretical approach to narrative, and analyses of a really impressive range of writers and texts. It’s a really valuable contribution to our field and an excellent piece of scholarship in every way.