The chapter explores the emergence of the American short story in the context of a “culture of wonder” that dominated the Atlantic world of print prior to Washington Irving. Although ghost stories, and tales of apparitions and witchcraft were often discarded as formless pieces, these “small tales” were widely reprinted in the pages of early transatlantic magazines, fostering sensational effects as well as transgressive stories about individuals whose behavior was outside the norm. The chapter examines the circulation of early short narratives in the context of serialized imprints such as magazines and newspapers. It focuses on popular topics such as ghost stories and sensationalistic tales. Moreover, the chapter unearths the rich archive of transatlantic storytelling, demonstrating how the short form combines oral and textual performances conditioning the nineteenth-century tale as it can be found in the writings of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.

The chapter points to the textual plurality of early Native newspapers, and particularly how their dense texture simultaneously conserves traditions and adapts to the new circumstances of modernization. The close readings in this chapter discuss two Indigenous periodicals: The Cherokee Phoenix and Copway’s American Indian, as well as related nonfiction texts. The chapter argues that antebellum Native publications are complex media artifacts whose relation to the construction of sovereignty is articulated through seriality; the circulation and reprinting of particular types of texts for particular readers; and material properties like the nonlinear and multisensory dynamics of the periodical’s page arrangements. It shows that the papers’ somewhat chaotic mixture of clippings, texts, and images constitutes a powerful discursive construct and, as a distinct media form, places Native writing at the vanguard of a transnational and transindigenous criticism of imperialism in the tumultuous decades of the early nineteenth century.