This chapter examines the legacy of Pirandello’s work in cinema. It outlines his own direct involvement in the medium, through novels (e.g., Shoot!), his work on adaptations and screenplays (for directors such as L’Herbier, Righelli, Ruttman), and essays expressing his ambivalent views on film as it evolved from the silent era to the “talkies.” This outline is followed by a survey of key film adaptations of his works (by Steno, de Sica, the Taviani brothers) and reflections on later film–theatre hybrids that mediate Pirandello’s transposition to the screen (e.g., by Rivette, Stoppard, Pinter). The chapter finally moves on to explore some broader, indirect forms of affinity that might be characterized as “Pirandellian.” It proposes four of these: films that play self-consciously and meta-cinematographically (e.g., by Nichetti, Allen); a cinema of “humorism” (e.g., in Fellini, Hitchcock); a cinema of selfhood that uses typical Pirandellian motifs such as doubling or insanity, among others (e.g., by Antonioni, Scorsese); and cinema as a medium of thought or philosophy (e.g., by Weir, Kaufman).

This chapter offers what Franco Moretti has called a “distant reading” of popular fictional narrative in the 1860s. That is, it concerns itself predominantly with charting changes in the larger units of generic form and publishing format, rather than attempting a close analysis of a limited set of canonical texts. The focus tends to fall on serial rather than volume publication, while the early career of Mary Elizabeth Braddon provides the subject of a specific case study. Such a procedure of course depends on the availability of comprehensive data sets, so that the chapter also touches on the recent growth in virtual archives and associated developments in the academic field of digital humanities, including the use of analytical methods owing more to book history than literary criticism.

This chapter examines social representation and class in the graphic novel. The turn towards book-length comics since the 1970s has often meant a replacement of the sprawling character networks of serial comics and an intense focus on individual protagonists. Section 5.2 explains the need for manual annotation of visual character in comics and looks at fourteen social networks of the most popular and prestigious graphic novels in the entire corpus. While superhero narratives like Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns retain elements of the more expansive social representation of popular comics, literary graphic novels often focus on individual protagonists within middle-class families. Section 5.3 adapts the empirical class analysis pioneered by Erik Olin Wright and discusses how this framework can be made to include an intersectional focus on gender and race.

The chapter seeks to problematize what it means to ‘map’ literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries through the example of Romantic poet John Clare. The first half of the chapter rereads Clare through one critical and two creative interpretations of his sense of place and space, by John Barrell, Franco Moretti, and Iain Sinclair. Reading Clare in, and through, others generates a multilayered response that highlights the range of spatial forms of interpretation embraced by literary studies whilst also critically interpreting both maps and texts used in those arguments. The second half of the chapter offers a fresh reading-as-mapping of Clare by prioritizing time over space, drawing upon a concept articulated by French historian Pierre Nora, that of lieux de mémoire (sites/realms of memory). Nora’s model of the loss of shared, lived history and its memorialization in fixed sites is applied to Clare to enable a move from a focus on the predominantly spatial to the spatio-temporal. Does the concept of lieux de mémoire only work at a macro level, or can be localized in an individual? This section seeks to come at place through the memory that it embodies.

The Introduction begins with the challenge of understanding the impact of settler colonialism on Victorian literary culture when it is largely invisible as a subject. It proposes that settler colonialism reveals common ground between the novel and political economy, centered on their shared investments in the Scottish Enlightenment’s stadial theory of societal development, which saw settled cultivation as the threshold to civilization, culture, and capital. Drawing on the claims of British world history, I argue that the cultural texts of settler colonialism were inseparable from its financial considerations throughout the Victorian period, while Franco Moretti’s model of “place-bound” genre offers a localized understanding of literary form that allows for the shaping influence of settler environments. When ideas of British subjectivity and society were challenged by events in Australia and New Zealand, writers responded through formal innovations in the novel and political economy. In addition, retracing imperial networks of influence and exchange brings to light the material pathways that allowed specific settler revisions of British identity to reshape metropolitan writing.