Narrative is a “mimesis” of human action, as defined by Aristotle. Mimesis is achieved by means of discourse, the combination of expressive signs available in a medium. In graphic narratives or story-manga, discourse utilizes three primary elements: image, word, and panel, with various expressive techniques developed for each. The actual signs of discourse, however, serve only as a starting point. It is by utilizing imaginative supplementation that the reader is able to interpret events, receive impressions, understand temporal and spatial transitions, and grasp the overall structure of the narrative world, that is, the story. The cognitive process of the reader can be broken down into three hypothetical phases: micro-, meso- and macroscopic. This chapter provides an outline of each phase in order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of manga as a narrative medium in terms of its expressive means and the resulting narrative experience.

This chapter explores the magazine culture of late colonial and early national America in order to recover the crucial role played by the short story in the periodical’s overburdened ambition to bring “cultural capital” across the Atlantic. Looking at these magazines we find the short story in unlikely places and forms – embedded within other fictions or non-fiction narratives, serialized in relationship to prized illustrations, or disguised as the “serial essay.” But while the print economy of the magazine would change dramatically by the 1840s and 1850s, resulting in the rise of the more familiar and recognizable periodical short story, the magazine short story has been there virtually from the beginning.

The Coda traces fashion’s permeation of the novel genre into our contemporary moment, and contends that the novel’s innovative engagement with digital technology and social media over the past decade has roots firmly in the nineteenth century. Historicizing the advent of Twitter-fiction, the Coda proposes that we recognize in contemporary fiction’s experiments with seriality and hypercurrency an upcycling of narrative forms developed in analogous moments of profound change in the nineteenth century. Twitter-fiction explores the relation of parts and wholes, of individuals and collectivities, in an historical age when digital mediation enables new configurations of publicness, when virtual self-expression is the medium less of identity than main character energy, and when the timeframe of the quotidian has become an inadequate measure of the experience of historical change. The Coda argues that contemporary writers who immerse their fiction in the media and sensibilities of the moment may risk radical obsolescence, but that is precisely the point: they aim to conceptualize the temporality and textures of the immediate present.

Frederick Douglass’s correspondence emerges in the wake of his self-emancipation and occupies a singular place in nineteenth-century American letters. It is a body of work unprecedented in its scope and its capacity to provide an anchor to the networks of activism in which Douglass wielded such influence. It marks a turn in African American letters in which the epistolary is repurposed as a tool of emancipation and of radical archival practice. His correspondence mobilizes the letter as an instrument of emancipation, able to establish political community and map cartographies of freedom that challenged the limitations placed by the United States on African American autonomy. At the same time, his letters provide a glimpse behind the scenes of a life lived to a great extent in the public eye, confirming the importance of family and home as concrete realities, and of domains of intimacy normally kept out of historical sight.

The Black periodical is important in its materiality, circulation, and the serial possibilities it affords. This chapter asks us to think about the periodical not only as where mid-century Black literature can be found but also as a media technology that uniquely facilitated a “transition from a transnationalism routed through a white transatlantic sensibility to one grounded in a Black hemispheric imaginary” through serialization. The political import of serializing novels in the Black press from the early 1850s to early 1860s is explored, including Dickens’s Bleak House in 1853 in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Martin Delany’s Blake in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. This chapter argues that these papers used serialization “to teach their readers how to relate the fight for Black freedom in the United States to transnational liberation movements.” While Bleak House taught readers not to be distracted by distant suffering, Blake’s serialization taught them that the Civil War was but one front of a Black hemispheric revolution. Haiti is located in an African American literary and political imaginary that was also mobilizing the Hungarian Revolution through serialized publication, meaning the political struggles at these sites could not be readily divorced from those of African Americans.

In the first decades of printing, medieval romances were edited and printed en masse, sometimes in luxurious in-folio formats. Sixteenth-century works of long prose narrative also drew on Classical epic and the dialogue. Notwithstanding these significant classical and medieval influences, there was no formal theorization of the novel in the sixteenth century—and indeed no single term to designate 'the novel' in this period. This absence of rigorous theorization and terminology contributed to making the period's vernacular prose narrative a privileged medium for literary experimentation: Rabelais's works were of course experimental in the highest sense, but other forms were also forged and promoted: in particular, sentimental and pastoral forms as well as the humanist model of the Greek novel based on Heliodorus. This period also forged new devices such as suspense and serialization, which would become signature features of the novel in the nineteenth century. Through all its incarnations and in the midst of formal experimentation, long prose narrative in this period opened a new horizon for reading: as a hobby, a pleasurable activity to fill the idle moments of life.

In nineteenth-century Britain, a new relationship developed between eating and reading: the cookbook emerged as a commercial form; realist novelists described meals in detail; written menus appeared on dining tables in both the public and domestic spheres. The fashion in dining style also shifted, from service à la Française, in which dishes were all served at once, to service à la Russe, in which meals were served to diners in courses. Dinner had become serialized. As this chapter reminds us, Victorians consumed much of their literature in serial form, and now mealtimes mirrored the apportioned, segregated, and suspenseful qualities of serialized fiction. Because service à la Russe was timed and choreographed by servants, the serialization of the meal played a role in the privatization of social and libidinal life. This chapter also traces nineteenth-century interests in civilized and uncivilized ways of eating, and the crucial role that diet and dining played in political protest. Industrialization had produced an era of grand excess and grisly deficits; when Charles Dickens compared capitalist and cannibal appetites he exposed the end-logic of consumer culture.

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) reached the widening public of his day. He captured the turn to a popular perspective, driving the transformation of Russian culture well into the twentieth century. His inclusive style lent dignity to nearly every character, though he could be ruthlessly ironic. He empathized with his readers and probed new views of identity, otherness, and the nation. In late works he emphasized beauty and the arts as superlative human values. He could engage with popular fiction well because he both read and wrote it. He honed skills that led to innovations in the short story and drama through his reading (and occasional writing) of serialized novels for the boulevard press of the 1880s. He read and corresponded about the best-known serialized bandit story of his day, N. I. Pastukhov’s The Bandit Churkin, which was serialized in The Moscow Sheet from 1882-1885. Chekhov turned the traditional Russian idea of the bandit’s spree or the binge into a deeper inquiry into the positive attributes of freedom. By the time of his death, he had arrived at his own understanding that freedom to create resides in a space coexistent with the world but beyond the encroachment of Church, state, and the market.

The mirror image of the Fool who succeeds despite himself is the rebel doomed to fail. Centuries of institutionalized servitude had begotten both actual and dreamed-of rebellion, with songs, poems, and legends that immortalized the rebels and their acts. Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol all had explored themes of freedom and rebellion, and post-Emancipation writers took these themes into the nascent medium of popular commercial fiction in the form of the adventure novel. The novels delivered excitement while reinforcing the wisdom of generations; to wit, that Russia’s secular and religious order could not be violated with impunity. Tolstoy in Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov innovated within a traditional mythology of rebels that had long served at once to question and accentuate the oppressive authority of tsarist rulers. At the time they were writing, the conventions that had led larger-than-life heroes and heroines to fulfillment or destruction were already changing in the shared Russian imagination. The cult of doomed rebellion associated with rebels had begun to give way to a new and growing emphasis on the agency and power of ordinary people.