This study aims to investigate and visualize sensationalism configurations in nineteenth-century Romanian serial novels by employing Sentiment and Emotion Analysis. According to literary history, one of the defining strategies of such texts is sustaining the reader’s curiosity across successive feuilletons, often through sensational, melodramatic, and cliffhanger endings. In order to test these remarks, we aim to track the fluctuation of the reader’s affective state and emotional responses throughout the reading process, in correlation with the novel’s serialized structure. Our research questions are the following: 1. Can we quantify and visualize sensationalism patterns based on the reader’s affective response? 2. Based on dominant emotions in feuilleton transitions, are there different types of sensationalism? To this end, our analysis centres on a small collection of popular novels, whose particularity is that they have been digitally edited in the Pop-Lite Corpus according to their original feuilleton structure. Following a strict protocol and preceded by extensive discussion, the annotation has been carried out manually. The study is an extension of a previous experiment that showed both a consistent sensationalism pattern based on sentiment shifts and different emotional strategies in two sets of feuilletons belonging to different authors. Previous insights will be validated through the analysis of a broader dataset, with the overarching objective of proposing a quantitative definition of sensationalism in nineteenth-century Romanian serial fiction.