This essay examines Romantic-era circulating libraries as a case study in the ways that institutions rather than individual authors create literary subgenres. The argument draws upon sociologically oriented research in literary and media studies and draws analogies between the history of the novel and the history of cinema. The growth of circulating libraries in the late eighteenth century created new markets for popular fiction, and this in turn spurred the creation of novelistic subgenres and formulas such as the gothic novel, the historical novel, and the season novel as means to respond to readerly demand for new titles. Circulating library catalogues and the novels themselves provide evidence of the ways that novelistic titles and subtitles signal generic affiliation to readers through keywords.

In five sections, this Conclusion correlates the features of Western Buddhist travel narratives with understandings of no-self. It reflects on what stories can show that is obscured by theories and explains the distinctive value of autobiographical narratives for interpreting no-self and experiences of unselfing. The theory developed builds on the ideas of Steven Collins, Ann Taves, John Hick, and others. Western narratives are compared to an eighteenth-century Tibetan autobiography as interpreted by Janet Gyatso. A fourth section reflects on why travel narratives often portray experiences of unselfing. Finally, a theory is proposed that links experiences of unselfing with autobiographical writing as related aspects of religious transformation. Self-transformation is the central theme of contemporary spiritual autobiography and the deepest religious concern at work in Buddhist thinking about no-self. Western Buddhist travel narratives offer crucial insights and wisdom about these matters.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.

Through its fifty-plus narrators and three central characters, the aspiring 17-year-old poet and narrator Juan Garcia Madero and his two “visceral-realist” mentors, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, Bolaño’s 1998 The Savage Detectives offers both a parody of the detective novel and an endlessly deferred quest, through the figure of Cesárea Tinajero, for “true” poetry. Radically raising the stakes of Bolaño’s commitment to the development of what a pivotal passage calls “poemas-novela,” its prose-poetic strategies resembling less a novel in the traditional sense than an impossibly sustained assemblage of loosely linked prose poems on an “epic,” in Bakhtin’s sense “novelistic” scale, it challenges the emphasis of the detective novel, and of the novel generally, on a certain violence of narrative emplotment, the monetized violence of narrative drive, of linear narrative, as plot itself. Complicit as Bolaño knows himself to be with the detective genre’s commercial appeal, he understands the legacies of Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, of detective fiction and the prose poem, as both a “savage” threat to poetry, leading to its “death” and “murder,” and as a potential convergence that makes possible, as the last name of the narrator Amadeo Salvatierra suggests, its rebirth and redemption in manifold forms.