This chapter considers the popularity of the genre of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores, in particular, a class of magazine stories for which the terms of approval followed the lines of reading for amusement and entertainment. Surveying critical accounts of the short story, and the burgeoning interest in anthologies and handbooks for aspiring writers, the chapter considers what follows if we not only accept but accentuate the notion of the genre as an artistic commodity in a gendered marketplace defined by overabundance. Special consideration is given to the subgenre of “storiettes” published alongside a column covering “the latest fads” in Munsey’s magazine. The essay argues that the style of the period’s short story developed in tandem with ideas about it as a fashionable and consumable commodity, and even as something of a fad.

Recent popular accounts of how to face death have strikingly hinged on passages from early modern literature, whether invoking Montaigne’s essays or Shakespeare’s elegiac verse. As there is currently a struggle to face a climate crisis and declining faith in institutions, can a previous era’s confrontation with death provide resources for present-day quandaries? This chapter argues that it can, through a renewed attention to the formal homologies between ‘craft of dying’ handbooks and dramaturgical practice. These manuals, often framed in the theatricalized form of a series of dialogues, were performative in their very structure. They provide behaviour that is scripted, and then practised, and then enacted, with actors and audiences. Like the anatomy theatre and the rhetorical quaestiones tradition, the craft of dying ought to be considered one of the fundamental cultural practices that led to early modern drama's staging of death. At today's crucial juncture, returning to this theatrical craft of dying might help, in Tennyson’s words, to ‘teach [us] how to hope, / Or tell [us] how to die'.

This chapter explores how late nineteenth-century self-care guides, exercise manuals, and travel handbooks began to integrate Eastern physical and spiritual practices as health advice. It considers how European and American women became increasingly intrigued by and immersed within practices such as meditation, yoga exercises (asana), and breathing methods (pranayama). Tracing connections between gender and empire, the chapter suggests that engagement with Indian yogic philosophies and physical practices offered women alternatives to Western medicine – an increasingly institutional system from which they were often excluded. In a culture where medical and scientific practices increasingly limited women’s participation and sometimes stifled their capabilities and experiences, many women turned to foreign spaces as sites of healing and participated within alternative systems of self-care that encouraged more flexible and intuitive ways of thinking about the body and its relationship to the mind and spiritual practices.