This essay examines how nineteenth-century American literature paved the way for the modern exposure of private life in such disparate venues as the gossip column, social media, and reality television. In particular, this essay examines the sketch form, a popular nineteenth-century prose genre that has often been characterized as a minor form in comparison to the novel. In examining the history of the sketch form, this essay shows how the sketch conveyed reservations about the interiority and exposures central to the novel form. As practiced by Washington Irving, the earliest popularizer of this genre, the sketch advocated respectful discretion, the avoidance of private matters, and social stasis, the latter of which positioned the sketch in opposition to the social mobility characteristic of the novel. Irving presented the sketch as the genre of literary discretion, but its latter practitioner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, used the sketch to divulge confidences and violate social decorum. Willis adapted the sketch to become a precursor of the gossip column and to mirror the novel form in exposing private life.

This essay draws upon recent developments in histories of finance and Black studies to argue for an expanded consideration of late nineteenth-century speculative fiction. In recent decades, speculation has emerged as a foundational methodology, critical framework, and literary genre in African American literary studies and Black studies. Yet, within this body of scholarship, speculative fiction is most often associated with anti-realist modes that imagine alternate futures while speculative reading and research methods double as a critique of our political and disciplinary limits. Through a close reading of Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition, this essay considers how speculation’s late nineteenth-century instruments and logics determine the novel’s political horizons and narrative structure. By attending to the financial workings of late nineteenth-century novels that might seem to strain against the bounds of either genre fiction or speculative research methods, this essay argues that we can begin to see how a work like Chesnutt’s interrogates a particularly postbellum outlook on the future, one in which the terms of financial speculation can only imagine a future that is an intensification of the past.

Via an analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, this chapter argues that character – the notion that a person’s value is defined by attributes of character – was the dominant value form shaping novelistic poetics under the nineteenth-century industrial economy. Trollope’s novels bear witness to the growing influence of financial transactions in the British economy. Upon first glance, Trollope’s critique of finance capital is fairly well worn, embedded as it is in anti-Semitic and xenophobic tropes, but this chapter focuses on how the financial narratives in Can You Forgive Her? (1864) and The Prime Minister (1876) cast finance capital as an affront to the very logic of character as a novelistic value form. In those novels, we begin to see the unraveling of character, which opens up the possibility for another literary value form to emerge under modernism.

Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

Why have we been so quick to dismiss late nineteenth-century Haitian novels in the field of francophone postcolonial studies? What have we failed to recognize as francophone or postcolonial in these texts? And how can we now begin to revisit them? This chapter proposes to answer these questions by drawing attention to the historical predicament that led nineteenth-century Haitian intellectuals and writers to embrace the West’s narratives of civilization and modernity when such discourses were in fact integral to North Atlantic imperialisms and white supremacy. It first provides a historical overview of the Haitian novel from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to its booming production in the early 1900s. It then sheds light on Demesvar Delorme’s Francesca and Louis Joseph Janvier’s Une Chercheuse, two novels that help us understand how Haitian intellectuals sought to exist in a Eurocentric, international lettered sphere. Finally, it concludes by considering some of the ethical and intellectual challenges we must face in order to do justice to such works and their authors.

While Jacques Roumain’s classic novel Gouverneurs de la rosée foregrounds the possibility and necessity of return to Haiti, in many other literary versions of Haitian exile such a reconnection is never achieved. The returning wanderer can never just pick up where they left off, and the exile is definitive, unending. The chapter argues that exile for Haitian authors of the twentieth century is not merely a question of space or place; it has temporal dimensions that can compound the sense of separation or loss. Following a consideration of nineteenth-century exile-related poems, the chapter engages with some of the most prominent essayists, poets, and novelists whose works serve as chronicles of the multi-generational experiences of separation from Haiti before, during, and after the Duvalier dictatorships. As the examples show, experiences of exile vary widely and are determined by many factors, including personal circumstance, the place and conditions of exile, changing realities in the homeland, and evolving notions of exile itself, and of the ways in which it is written by successive generations of authors.

As a result of French colonization, Haiti is a nation-state with a predominantly French-speaking written tradition. However, there is also a smaller body of Haitian texts written in Creole, dating back to the eighteenth century. Based on their linguistic and aesthetic characteristics, we can divide the corpus of Haitian Creole letters into two main chronological stages: the great period of emergence that stretches from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century, and the period of emulation. The first period was dominated by texts of a mainly religious, administrative, and political nature. Written for the most part by high-ranking white settlers, these texts, using the local language, were intended for Creole-speaking slaves with a poor command of French. The second period, that of the autonomy of Creole letters or the beginnings of an authentic Creole literary tradition, began in the mid-twentieth century, in parallel with linguistic work to standardize the written code of the national language. This advance in the standardization of Creole led to a significant development of the language’s written code, particularly in the field of literature.

In comparison to other canonical writers of the mid eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith has left little from which his views on fiction might be ascertained. This chapter considers both canonical English novels of the middle of the century, and contemporary French writing, as important contexts for the study of Goldsmith’s fiction, and in particular his Vicar of Wakefield. Also considered are problematic attributions to Goldsmith of works other than his famed Vicar, and the longevity and geographical reach of that novel’s appeal.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

Is queerness coeval with American-ness, or with the American version of neoliberalism? The writers explored in this chapter, many of whom have close ties to countries other than the United States, are all preoccupied with these questions. Some, such as Tomasz Jedrowski and Garth Greenwell, implicitly accept queer identity as an American export. Others, including Chinelo Okparanta and Zeyn Joukhadar, fight to carve out small, temporary spaces of resistance to queerness’s entanglements with a certain brand of Western-ness. Others still, such as Shyam Selvadurai and Akwaeke Emezi, create interstitial queer identities that draw on non-Western understandings of selfhood and set them in conversation with mainstream Western queer culture. Focusing on the novel, this chapter engages with writers who identify as gay, lesbian, genderqueer, and trans/ogbanje, hailing from Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Germany/Poland, and Syria as well as the United States; while most of them are Anglophone, it also considers some examples of non-Anglophone representations of Western notions of queerness, such as Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.

Chapter 10 examines Goethe’s development as a writer of prose across the spectrum of forms, beginning with his radicalisation of the epistolary novel through his Werther. It highlights significant influences – from Giovanni Boccaccio to Sophie von La Roche – and, at the same time, emphasises the singularity of his writing. It also reflects on Goethe’s use of deliberate aestheticisation as a means of contending with the instability of human life. The chapter shows that Goethe’s prose writing is both thoroughly embedded in and transcends the many contexts from which it emerged.

The erosion of democracy has shown itself to be a necessary political precondition for the implementation of neoliberalism. Utopian culture quickly attuned itself to this crisis of democracy, and while there certainly are not many works of utopian culture that uncritically embrace the dominant post-1989 narrative that hails democracy as the universal cure for whatever ailment may exist in the world, we begin to see the emergence of works that foreground the profound danger inherent in the waning of democracy precisely in times of its instrumentalization by Western capitalist nations and the forces of economic globalization. Authors reveal neoliberal utopias as antidemocratic dystopias against which democracy must be defended. Moreover, we also see the emergence of novels that address a second pressing question: how can democracy survive when populations decide to democratically abolish it?

The Introduction provides an overview of the book’s argument about how novels in nineteenth-century Britain (by George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, and Thomas Hardy) represented modes of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of uncertainty. It also offers a synopsis of key intellectual contexts: (1) the history of probability in logic and mathematics into the Victorian era, the parallel rise of statistics, and the novelistic importance of probability as a dual concept, geared to both the aleatory and the epistemic, to objective frequencies and subjective degrees of belief; (2) the school of thought known as associationism, which was related to mathematical probability and remained influential in the nineteenth century, underwriting the embodied account of mental function and volition in physiological psychology, and representations of deliberation and action in novels; (3) the place of uncertainty in treatises of rhetoric, law, and grammar, where considerations of evidence were inflected by probability’s epistemological transformation; and (4) the resultant shifts in literary probability (and related concepts like mimesis and verisimilitude) from Victorian novel theory to structuralist narratology, where understandings of probability as a dual concept were tacitly incorporated.