This chapter seeks to revisit Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella, a foundational fiction of the Haitian Revolution which is considered to be the first novelistic representation of the event written by a Haitian author. This nineteenth-century novel gives rise to an infinite number of themes yet to be explored. The narrative design that examines the Slave Revolution of 1791 highlights the conflict between Blacks and mulattoes through two main protagonists, the brothers Romulus and Rémus. It focuses on the filiation that the Black Revolution maintains with the French Revolution by evacuating the question of agency among the revolutionaries and instead favors a purely providential approach through the white heroine Stella. The chapter attempts to offer a contrapuntal reading of Bergeaud’s figurative rendition of the Revolution by contrasting two dominant views, that of the colonizer and that of the colonized.

Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

Chapter Seventeen provides an ambitious synthesis of many of the concepts and authors addressed earlier in the volume in order to argue for two intertwining genealogies of modern fiction: on the one hand, the historical and social novel, and on the other, the Gothic, fantastic tales, and other non-realist literary forms. All these genres and forms encode questions of uneven development and often also express a sense of historical and epistemological disorientation. The chapter opens with examples of crossovers between fiction and other artforms to show the rich variety of forms and their influence on European culture. It then looks at cross-border influences and on individual nations’ different material conditions. Romanticism inherited and transformed a series of existing forms and themes, including travel literature, the epistolary novel, the Gothic, and the picaresque, into new forms, including the Bildungsroman, the fragment, the tale, and novella. These reflect an intense self-consciousness regarding historical time and place, even when they appear most ahistorical.

Australian novels of recent decades, canonical and lesser-known works, created by both Indigenous and non-indigenous writers, have been telling stories the nation and its readers have not wanted to hear for most of Australia’s colonial history. While novelists did engage, prior to the 1980s, with Indigenous presence on the continent, such engagement was sporadic and mostly peripheral to grander stories of pioneering bravado, white achievement and the battle with nature on the frontier. Now, peripheral stories have moved to the centre, for Australia was not an empty land settled peacefully by the British. The land was already occupied by sovereign nations of people. Storied, sung place was invaded with orchestrated violence; the land was taken, not ‘taken up’. Indigenous peoples now demand that their ‘ancient sovereignty’ be allowed to ‘shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’ via constitutional amendment and treaty. Read against the backdrop of relatively recent developments – land rights, the Mabo decision, Stolen Generations, History Wars – this chapter examines work by non-indigenous authors like Kate Grenville and Andrew McGahan as well as Indigenous writers such as Alexis Wright and Tara June Winch, in tracing the rise of the postcolonial novel in Australian fiction.

Where in the nineteenth century the representation of Aboriginal characters and things was occasional and marginal in the Australian novel, the twentieth century saw a new attention to Aboriginal characters. The twentieth century saw Australia’s foundation in 1901 marred by the emergence of the White Australia policy, which excluded migrants of colour and indirectly affected Aboriginal policy. So would begin a vexed erotics of miscegenation. In her short fiction, Katharine Susannah Prichard would deal with cross-race relations in northern Australia before producing her influential novel Coonardoo in 1929. Nearly a decade later, Xavier Herbert published Capricornia (1938), an epic northern Australian novel concerned with assimilation. Each of these novels is concerned with the field of discursive Aboriginality as a fantasy space for negotiations of appropriate whiteness and identity, as is Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land trilogy (1941–53) and even works by Patrick White such as Voss (1957) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976), to finally mark the beginning of what has been called post-Mabo fiction in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993). This chapter tracks these examples of Aboriginal as represented in Australian novels and more ‘minor’ ones along the way.

Chapter 3 reads Virginia Woolf’s The Years as a domestic novel, even though it eschews all the landmarks – births, deaths, marriages and courtships – that typically animate the genre. If consent in nineteenth-century novels is typically doubled – consent to the marriage contract reading as consent to the social contract – I find, in Woolf, a critique of the whole idea, as she presents characters who are interpellated into a social system that predates them. Reading the novel alongside recent work in Social Reproduction Theory – and with the aid of Judith Butler’s notion of the “heterosexual matrix” – I show how Woolf situates her investigation of gender within a larger social totality even as she, characteristically, finds agency within its determining structures. Woolf’s domestic novel here transforms into its opposite – a historical novel – as she meditates on the passing of time and the way new social forms emerge out of conditions inherited from the past.

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.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.

Mark Goble uses the concept of convergence to explore the implications of formal and temporal compression, economy, and slowness in an age of unprecedented expansion and speedup. Richard McGuire’s Here presents an extreme example of spatial restriction and temporal expansion, while novels by Ruth Ozeki, Richard Powers, and William Gibson juxtapose ecological, scientific, technological, and theological timespans to human ones in ways that echo postmodern and science fiction precursors, but with very different aims and warnings in mind for denizens of the Anthropocene.

This chapter identifies and analyses some of the major trends of the millennial novel in French from the huge and diverse corpus on offer: ‘reality, not realism’, ‘history, but for the present’, ‘fantasy and the ludic’, ‘language, but not for language’s sake’. The titles signal how these millennial versions of trends recognisable from past centuries have taken on nuances that clearly distinguish them from their predecessors. The millennial ‘realist’ novel stages authentic, non-fictional voices within a fictional frame, using the fictional as a means of investigation into reality; the millennial historical novel takes a présentiste (Hartog) approach to history, often using the present tense to bring even the distant past into the realm of the present. The millennial version of the fantastical and ludic novel benefits from the readers’ greater awareness of the novel as a created object, an awareness which is also exploited by writers of more popular literature. So too do the novelists who experiment with language, producing works that depend on the reader’s acceptance of it as belonging to a fictional universe. The chapter concludes that a readership trained in the art of novel-reading is vital to the success of all of these trends.

The realist novel can be understood to bear witness to a changed understanding of history, ushered in with the modern era. This chapter argues that the French realist novel grew out of the historical novel, insofar as it attempted to offer a history of the present. However, a history of the present is challenging if not impossible to write because of the difficulty, and even the impossibility, of achieving a sufficiently distanced vantage point. French realist novels, consequently, aim to represent present reality but indirectly suggest the impossibility of any such representation. The chapter goes on to show that the French realist novels of the 1830s draw attention to the changeable nature of the present, partly because of the unstable social and political contexts of nineteenth-century France, and partly because of a shift in the way that people conceived of present reality. In at least two broad and closely interconnected senses, therefore, the early French realist novel is profoundly historical in its ambitions: it aims to offer a history of the present, however flawed that attempted history necessarily is, and it reveals the historical, or mutable, qualities of the present that it attempts to capture.

The chapter describes the emergence of the personal novel in the first decade of the nineteenth century and its subsequent evolution thirty years later in parallel with the rise of the historical novel in France. These developments were shaped by changes in book production and readership after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, leading in the 1830s to the increasing professionalization of writing. While maintaining a narrative focus on the experience of insoluble personal conflicts, the personal novel is as much concerned with the transformations and conflicts of post-Revolutionary life as with an altered private domain. Though eclipsed by the realist novel in the middle part of the century, it exerted a prolonged influence, formal as well as thematic, on fiction in Europe and beyond for 100 years or more. The kinds of motivations to which the protagonists of the personal novel appeal, because these imply a break with received belief systems, tend to be sources of scandal. The fictions themselves border on scandal in representing the reasons for these outcomes and also show how challenging it is for those who witness such actions to evaluate or respond to them. The forms through which fiction performs this role would prove to be adaptable to the representation of quite different subsequent social changes. Thus, from the 1830s the novel displays increasing ideological militancy, notably in the work of Sand.

This chapter examines one of Ireland’s longest-lasting sources of engagement with the global South, namely the set of ethical dispositions and embedded practices that we traditionally call “humanitarian aid.” For much of the twentieth century, Ireland’s sense of itself as both a postcolonial nation and an advanced Western democracy found expression in an intense preoccupation with humanitarian aid for newly independent African countries. Over the last two decades, this history of humanitarian action has become a prominent motif in Irish fiction, featuring centrally in fiction by Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, and J. M. O’Neill. In the hands of these authors, humanitarianism has emerged as a vehicle for reflecting on Ireland’s place in the world – from the ethical attunement to suffering bodies that has dominated Irish representations of the global South to the political stakes involved in refracting such sentimentalized images through the language of anticolonial nationalism.

Was there an indigenous Gothic in nineteenth-century Italy, a local reworking of English (and perhaps Continental) forms and models’? This chapter addresses this much-debated issue by making a case for the clear presence of Gothic motifs and structures in several Italian novels, from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) (particularly in its earliest version, Fermo e Lucia, c. 1821–3) to Carlo Lorenzini’s Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883). The chapter discusses the contribution of the so-called ‘Scapigliati’ authors to the Italian Gothic and offers a survey of later writers from the verista and naturalista literary schools. Later in the century, Italian realist writers seem to veer into the realm of the supernatural. The chapter thus closes with looking at the anti-rationalist discourses that flourished at the close of the century, and at such hermeneutical modalities as spiritualism, mesmerism and occultism that became increasingly fashionable in the popular press. Vampire literature and the Italian legacy of German and English Gothic are also addressed, with references to, among others, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi and the national novelists of the first half of the century.