A brief summary of Collins’s activities as as Victorian author in multiple modes

The chapter offers an analysis of an understudied episode in British and American popular fiction. Inspired by Greenland’s vanished settlers, a number of tales imagine isolation as a means to preserve the virtues and primordial purity of a white, ancestral past. These ‘lost colony’ stories are examined as partly compensatory fantasies that would offset contemporary concerns about cultural and racial decay for a culture under stress. They are narratives about communities – modelled on the idea of a lost European colony – that have been shielded from the corruption visited upon the Western world. Thus, the stories are often concerned with ethnic purity and eugenics. The last part of the chapter unravels the early twentieth-century press sensation that disrupted fantasies of ring-fenced whiteness in the Arctic. This was the discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos in Victoria Island, who were purportedly the result of the old Greenland colonists having intermixed with the Indigenous population. The chapter concludes with an examination of how this new imagining of the fate of Greenland’s vanished settlers also impacted the writing of adventure tales for the popular market.

This chapter tracks descriptions of and responses to literary excess through the two groups of people most implicated in the Romantic period’s perceptions of it: reviewers and authors themselves. Beginning with the bibliographical commonplace that the end of the eighteenth century was the moment at which the number of novels published first began to exceed the annual reviewing capability of the traditional reviews, it follows the fate of the Minerva Press’s novels in the pages of major and minor periodicals, demonstrating how a rhetoric of excess in these reviews not only established popular discourses about which novels were worthwhile, but actively marginalized certain categories of fiction. Authors, naturally, responded to these attacks, and the chapter traces their use of prefaces to defend their work and position their own novels within a crowded marketplace.

This introduction argues that the fiction produced in the Romantic Era was shaped by a collective sense of overwhelming literary excess. After an overview of the different kinds of ‘excess’ about which contemporaries worried and a brief history of the Minerva Press’s historical and literary significance and its explicit ties to Romantic novel production, the introduction develops a critical framework for thinking about excess and its relationship to novel publication and prestige. Exploring the literal and metaphorical connections between the publication of fiction and other kinds of mass production in the Romantic period turns attention to the novel’s material qualities and the ways they were produced.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

By 10.00 p.m. on October 23, 1789, the three killers’ machetes had finished their brutal work. Even before the sun had risen the next morning, information about the Dongo massacre had begun to spread quickly throughout Mexico City. On street corners, in taverns, and over breakfast in private residences, no one could resist talking about this shocking event. We cannot accurately recreate the path of the oral gossip after two centuries. However, a paper trail started to memorialize the events soon after Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco put down their weapons. Mexico’s most important nineteenth-century writers and intellects began to publish accounts of the murders and the investigation in the 1830s. These printed texts eventually led to a small boom in fictional reinterpretations of the crime and its aftermath in the 1860s. For the new nation, the murder and its rapid resolution symbolized the extremes of Spanish rule. Mexicans pondered how to deal with a continuing perception of excessive criminality in their society, an issue that independence from Spain had not resolved.

This chapter addresses Jacobi’s literary contributions, Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar, in the context of his critique of both Enlightenment reason and feeling. Both, Jacobi argues, undermined human individuality and freedom.

The short story is not just a story that is short: the short story generally differs significantly from the novel in terms of scope, timeframe, number of characters and locations. How details acquire priority in short fiction. The relationships between the short story, flash fiction and poetry. The challenges and pleasures of short and very short fiction. The usefulness of short form writing to the developing novelist in the scope it offers for experimentation with narrative voice, characterisation and dialogue, as well as its value in its own right.

‘It is a complexity of afterthought, a psychological or emotional residue, that we seek to leave with the reader following the intense experience of consuming a short story.’

This chapter traces the reappearance of key features of literary modernism – especially narrative foretelling and the archival sleuth – in South Asian dictator fiction. It reveals that several techniques credited to Anglo-American modernists became “revenants” in South Asia through affiliative movement toward an unacknowledged middle generation in Latin America. Mohammad Hanif, joined by Salman Rushdie and Mohsin Hamid, portray the specter of political violence in Pakistan by adapting some of the most recognizable traits that boom superstars Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa developed out of their own readings of the North American modernist William Faulkner. Modernist narrative complexity has often been cast as apolitical or even reactionary. In contrast, South Asian authors suggest that such styles undo the easy certainties the dictator offers and uses language to challenge him on the grounds of the literal power to “dictate.” At the same time, Hanif and others use revenant structures to manage the “overheard” quality of writing in English – that is, as a way of addressing two totally distinct audiences at once.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.

This chapter provides readers with a sense of the various ways Mailer experimented with and contributed to the novel form, as he tried his hand at everything from political allegory to detective novel to spy thriller to ancient epic, among other novelistic genres. The chapter contextualizes Mailer’s novels within their various genres and offers an overview of his development within the form.

Cultural identities are developed through new critical frameworks for Asian American aesthetics. The shifting demographic changes in Asian America as well as the growth of new literary forms such as graphic narratives shape our critical investments and produce alternative subject formations. Arguing for plurality and flexibility, this chapter looks at the productive ways that experimental forms of literature such as graphic narratives can resist the totalization and commodification of Asian American identity. Rejecting reductive stereotypical representations of Asian Americans and emphasizing the need for a reconceptualization of how we discuss race, graphic narratives challenge existing caricatures and stereotypes, problematize the narratives of race, and offer experimental forms of representation.

This chapter examines the genre of sensation fiction, which flourished alongside efforts to introduce British women’s suffrage into the Ballot Act of 1872. Sensation and suffrage were both seen as alarming, unnatural, and immoral attempts for women to gain representation. Sensation novels inspired much critical hand-wringing through their depiction of antiheroines and villainesses that supposedly imperiled the virtue and femininity of the female reader, who identified with them against her will. Modern critics tend to accept sensation’s self-advertisement according to which it elicits a reflexive, psychosomatic response from female readers. This chapter, however, asserts that Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s narrative techniques in her popular sensation novels prompt readers’ awareness of and resistance to the affinities ostensibly endorsed by the novels, soliciting the reader’s choices among multiple possible perspectives. At issue in the arguments for and against women’s enfranchisement were notions of women’s ethical integrity and susceptibility to affective influence. The chapter contends that sensation fiction fomented scandal not because it corrupted impressionable female readers with its content, but because it challenged the automatized emotionalism ascribed to women and promoted, instead, their rational and ethical autonomy – in direct opposition to the premises held by the anti-suffragists.

This chapter locates a new cultural anxiety in the late nineteenth century about the woman who under-identifies, that is, refuses or is simply incapable of a feminine standard of emotional identification with literature. The expression of this anxiety, in New Woman novels of the fin de siècle and George Gissing’s New Grub Street and The Odd Women, reveals the ways in which identification can both reinforce and subvert gender categories. In these novels, and in sources ranging from proceedings of the British Medical Association to humor magazines, Victorian commentators blamed women’s apparent detachment from literary identification on the professionalization of their reading, and attributed its symptoms to a kind of sickness or blighted fertility. Women’s emotional disinvestment from literature was depicted as not merely wayward but pathological. More than a century of overt crises about the management of female identification culminated in the fear that women might not emotionally identify with literature at all, validating the book’s larger argument that irrational identification had come to define femininity itself.

This chapter examines the gendered critique of atheism made by Phebe Gibbes in her sentimental epistolary novel The History of Lady Louisa Stroud, and the Honourable Miss Caroline Stretton (1764). Gibbes’s novel casts atheism as the root of both sexual violence and patriarchal abuse. On the other hand, belief in a God who will eventually right the cultural and institutional wrongs that beset eighteenth-century Englishwomen is crucial to Gibbes’s heroines’ successful resistance to the novel’s villainous male seducers. I conclude the chapter by turning to Gibbes’s more widely discussed Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), arguing that the novel calls for both Western and Eastern theists to unite against irreligion and unbelief. Gibbes’s two novels illustrate how eighteenth-century depictions of men’s sexual infidelity and imperialist violence were often couched in terms of religious faithlessness. Thus, the atheist represents a capacious figure of disdain for Gibbes, one that embodies various forms of faithlessness and is, therefore, entirely opposed to women’s well-being and the benignant ecumenical fantasy Gibbes imagines in her orientalist fiction.

This chapter argues that eighteenth-century moral philosophers, divines, and literati almost unanimously agreed that theism is necessary to sustain community and social stability. With this correlation in place, atheists were routinely denied the capacity for human sympathy. To make this case, the chapter focuses on two midcentury novels by Sarah Fielding: The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel, Volume the Last (1753). In these fictions, Fielding employs atheism to explore both the limits of modern selfhood and the limits of literary representation. Alongside eighteenth-century moral philosophers like John Locke, Shaftesbury, and Lord Kames, whom I examine in the chapter’s first section, Fielding casts the atheist as the fundamental incarnation of a completely autonomous self. More to the point, she insists that that self is incapable of integrating successfully into a wider community defined by developing notions of civility, sociability, and fellow feeling.

This chapter highlights New York’s singular capacity to inspire dialogue across disciplines, a practice that emerges in recent ekphrastic novels set in the post-millennial period that investigate how aesthetic experience shapes subjective reflections on time, economics, and loss. This turn towards narrativizing aesthetic experience, and how formal encounters with art may prompt critical self-inquiry, reflects these authors’ commitment to cultivate values like emotional responsiveness, perceptual acuity, and even interpersonal solidarity. This ethos, bred by a heightened aesthetic awareness, comes in response to what these authors recognize to be an erosion of creative and emotional vitality caused in part by the pervasive marketability of art in late capitalism, otherwise known as image culture.

This chapter examines the representation of walking within the modern novels of New York. In American literature, walking the city seems to incarnate some coincidence between the uncertainties of discourse and the fluctuations of a place that is both circumscribed and open to the unknown. Walking the city cannot simply be considered as the pretext of a realist description nor simply associated with an abstract means of enunciation either. The act of walking reveals the manner in which writers sense and recite what may be no more than an emotion: an experience of the influx of fragments, of the grating notes and inflexions that nonetheless constitute the city. Walking the streets of New York, in American fiction, therefore simultaneously emblematizes the metatextual questioning of a discourse that is now conscious of its own limitations and the involvement of this discourse in the sensitive diversity of the world. Indeed, far from estranging the text from the world, far from alienating words into some reflexive abstraction, far from secluding discourse into some intransitive, self–sufficient construct, the consideration of the limits of language makes the very substance of the novel vibrate with endless possibilities.

terrorist attacks. Since the skyline of New York City had been substantially altered, post–9/11 American literature often framed the attacks and their consequences within this new, ideologically charged geography. Imagining New York after 9/11 soon turned into a twofold task for writers: trying to find words for the inexplicable events while at the same time avoiding to simply echo or resound the overused images, well–trodden rhetorical pathways, and hegemonic political messages that had rooted themselves firmly within the public consciousness and collective memory of Ground Zero.