This chapter shows how the best-selling novelist Walter Scott turned the era’s rhetoric of excess to his own commercial ends. Scott’s novels were frequently and directly compared with those published by the Minerva Press in the previous two decades; Scott’s defenders marked the 1814 publication of Waverley as the death knell of Minerva, while his detractors habitually remarked upon the parallels between his numerous, voluminous novels and those produced in equally large quantities by the Press. In readings of Scott’s early novels and his self-conscious paratexts, the chapter shows how his novels explore an antiquarian system of valuation in which even the most uninteresting document becomes valuable to posterity as soon as it’s rare. Scott uses this logic to offer a unique defence of the ‘innumerable’ popular novels that flowed from his pen and from the Minerva’s printing presses: their great numbers, he suggests, increase their chance of long-term survival. As both Scott and the Minerva Press authors who wrote alongside him argue in various ways, prolificity may ultimately lead to literary prestige rather than undermine it.

Chapter 4 examines the development of a documentary poetics in wartime Venice through three literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, and epideictic oratory. The war inspired a vast outpouring of patriotic and Islamophobic literature that reproduced the fact-oriented discourse of military expansion within a public sphere shaped less by reason than by imagination, emotion, and colonial desire. Viewing the literary field as part of a broader process of opinion formation, the chapter traces the links between political power and different sites of literary activity – the academies, the University of Padua, religious institutions, and the book market. It also shows how poets and writers appropriated military and colonial forms of documentation to mobilise support for the war and popularise images of a mighty imperial republic, destined by God to rule the Orient.

This chapter discusses historical fiction about Clodia Metelli (wrongly supposed to be Catullus’ Lesbia), from Marcel Schwob in 1895 to Kenneth Benton in 1974; a short postscript refers to subsequent treatments of the subject.

This essay explores several Emancipation-era novels reflecting the prevalence of the cross-cultural exchanges that defined Caribbean life at mid-nineteenth century, processes that are not readily apparent when looking at the region’s fiction through the lens of discrete anglophone, francophone, or hispanophone literary studies. Despite their different linguistic and cultural orientations, novelists like E. L. Joseph, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Juan José Nieto share an engagement with issues and themes that continue to define Caribbean literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thus, even as the conditions of each novel’s production are unique – whether created by a Cuban-born abolitionist writing of her native island from Spain (Avellaneda), or by an affiliate of Trinidad’s post-Emancipation planter class (Joseph), or by a political refugee from Colombia (Nieto) – they all exhibit a self-reflexive concept of caribeñidad or Caribbeanness. In so doing they also mark a point when the novel of the Caribbean became the Caribbean novel.