Andrew McCann is currently an associate professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College. He is author of Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (1999) and Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (2004).

• Introduction: popular fiction as media histrionics; 1. Property, professionalism and the pathologies of literature: Walter Besant and the discourse of authorship circa 1890; 2. Dreaming true: aesthetic experience, psychiatric power and the paranormal in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson; 3. Marie Corelli and the spirit of the market; 4. Writing aestheticism through colonial eyes: Rosa Praed and the theosophical novel; 5. Arthur Machen and the 'Differentia of Literature'; Conclusion: the popular fiction of critical theory; Bibliography.

Andrew McCann is currently an associate professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College. He is author of Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (1999) and Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (2004).

• Introduction: popular fiction as media histrionics; 1. Property, professionalism and the pathologies of literature: Walter Besant and the discourse of authorship circa 1890; 2. Dreaming true: aesthetic experience, psychiatric power and the paranormal in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson; 3. Marie Corelli and the spirit of the market; 4. Writing aestheticism through colonial eyes: Rosa Praed and the theosophical novel; 5. Arthur Machen and the 'Differentia of Literature'; Conclusion: the popular fiction of critical theory; Bibliography.

Andrew McCann is currently an associate professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College. He is author of Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (1999) and Marcus Clarke's Bohemia: Literature and Modernity in Colonial Melbourne (2004).

• Introduction: popular fiction as media histrionics; 1. Property, professionalism and the pathologies of literature: Walter Besant and the discourse of authorship circa 1890; 2. Dreaming true: aesthetic experience, psychiatric power and the paranormal in George Du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson; 3. Marie Corelli and the spirit of the market; 4. Writing aestheticism through colonial eyes: Rosa Praed and the theosophical novel; 5. Arthur Machen and the 'Differentia of Literature'; Conclusion: the popular fiction of critical theory; Bibliography.