This chapter makes an argument that two of the most successful Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens and R. S. Surtees, those new men of the 1830s (Surtees was twenty-five when he begins Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities; Dickens twenty-four at the conception of the Pickwick Papers), were both marked deeply by what came before in the late Georgian period’s popular-cultural print culture, notably its sporting comicalities. Though they took that tradition in very different paths – Surtees stayed in the sporting groove throughout his career, while Dickens very soon abandoned it – both were fashioned by it, and both initially positioned themselves within it. Both joined the key post-Napoleonic tradition of picaresque evident in the work of ‘Cockney’ humourists, in the fiction of Pierce Egan, and, indeed, in the poetry of Lord Byron. The chapter reads both men’s early writing against the wider context of late-Georgian print culture, addressing their relationship to the Romantic-era popular-cultural literary forms that inform their early work. The chapter brings to light this vibrant culture, focussing on Dickens and Surtees but also addressing such figures as Pierce Egan, Robert Seymour, and Thomas Hood.

In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

Chapter 13 investigates the road as a literary device, a metaphor (the “road to communism”), and a material reality. It argues that Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue can be read as a picaresque; the time–space of the road structured the chance meetings, incidents, and accidents that occasioned the collective narrator’s satirical survey of the world. Although Odnoetazhnaia Amerika deviated from the traditional picaresque, turning its gaze on the Other, rather than the rogue’s own society, it nonetheless offered an implicit critique of the Soviet “road to communism.” This was nowhere clearer than in the writers’ description of American highways; for readers familiar with Soviet roads, the contrast with the Soviet Union’s obviously inferior network of roads and roadside amenities would have been obvious.

Chapter 5 situates Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue in the context of earlier Russian American travelogues. Like the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Soviet novelist Boris Pilniak, Ilf and Petrov drew on the tradition established by Maxim Gorky of depicting a journey to America as a descent into hell. Nonetheless, the Soviet funnymen had a far lighter touch than their predecessors. The chapter argues that the travelogue can also be read as an adventure story in the vein of director Lev Kuleshov’s 1924 hit comedy "The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks." Lighthearted ethnographers, Ilf and Petrov lingered over the “extra-ideological realities” of the American landscape and made gentle fun of themselves as eager adventurers and participant observers.

Chapter 2 asks how one constructs a tradition and transforms an available genre in the absence of one’s own. An essay on the flower “jasmine,” triggered by a remark that in the tropics one did not know what the daffodils in Wordsworth’s heavily anthologized poem meant, is the starting point of this chapter. How to connect language to thought and how to reconcile a language with an absent tradition takes Naipaul to a search for an appropriate genre that would function as creative structural plinths to his Trinidadian social comedies. At Oxford he had translated the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes but had failed to find a publisher for it. Now he turns to the picaresque genre and its more immediate expressions in Joyce and Steinbeck as a vehicle for his representation of an essentially Trinidadian picaroon society. In the act, Naipaul consciously deconstructs the regulatory nature of the law of genre with its very opposite, its tendency towards disorder. The chapter examines Naipaul’s early works beginning with Miguel Street (1959), his first written work albeit third published, as well as the cinematic adaptation of The Mystic Masseur.

Chapter 2 examines the silver-fork novels resistance to the growing influence of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century fiction. Reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), this chapter contends that silver-fork novelists turn to the older form of the picaresque to keep their focus on an urban panorama in which individuals are accorded no greater priority than the social landscapes through which they move. I argue that silver-fork novelists use the picaresque to represent the chaotic surface of metropolitan life. Into this fast-changing, diverse landscape, they set a dandiacal protagonist whose skills at observation and adaptability make him uniquely qualified to navigate the contemporary world. The dandy occupies a position analogous to that of the commodities with which his society teems: he functions as an object in circulation, defined less by internal traits than by the situations and sets of relations through which he moves.

This chapter focuses on the proliferation of novels in the early decades of the eighteenth century that assumed the form of personal memoirs. Acknowledging arguments that link this new style of writing to demands for greater narrative plausibility, it also considers the popularity of the form in relation to the social upheavals driven by the increasing mobility of people and the flow of money associated with modernity and globalisation. It argues that the first-person form enabled novelists in this period to explore the importance of the novelistic imagination as a tool for adapting to difference and cultural change, foregrounding the use of narrative by those on the move in negotiating personal identity and social relationships. With particular reference to novels by Crébillon, Prévost, Marivaux and Lesage, it examines the different ways in which protagonists struggle to become authors and thereby exercise greater control over their lives, pointing to how the memoir-novel played a formative role in constructing the concept of an autobiographical subject and the contours of modern autobiography.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

The popular eighteenth-century genre of criminal biography is recognised today for its contribution to the development of the English novel, but its impact on Irish literature has not been explored to the same extent. However, criminal biographies were common fare for Irish readers in the 1700–1780 period. This chapter situates the criminal narrative, a form combining biographical and fictional content and drawing on the picaresque tradition, as an important subtext for the first Irish novels. It surveys the consumption of these texts in Ireland and their treatment of Irish settings and characters. Close readings are offered of a late-seventeenth-century fiction, The Irish Rogue (1690), and a mid-eighteenth-century collection of biographies, John Cosgrave’s A Genuine History of the Lives and Actions of the Most Notorious Irish Highwaymen, Tories and Rapparees (1747). Both can be singled out for their representations of nationality and travel, which enable them to undercut conventional associations between the Irish and criminality. Such rogue tales, it is argued, expanded the repertoire of Irish fiction, establishing characteristic strategies of plotting and characterisation which paved the way for later novels.

The nature of empire is that it is always at heart contradictory, suggesting a totalising unity but not homogeneity or equality. This chapter focuses on three very different Irish men of letters, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Moore and Charles Lever, exploring the contradictions at the heart of their engagement with the British Empire and the imperial project generally, and its influence on their writing. It also suggests ways in which these contradictions are later to be found in one of the great imperial novels – Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). Charles Gavan Duffy was an Irish nationalist and a prime minister of a British colony, who saw Thomas Moore’s poetry as the product of an ‘imperial mind’. Moore, in his turn, can be seen as the colonised figure incarnate, beholden to imperial patronage for his livelihood and yet able to find ways to express subversive feeling in his poetry and prose. Charles Lever was perhaps the Empire’s favourite Irish novelist in this period, and yet he seldom wrote about the Empire, and when he did, it was almost always negative in tone. Although he was a moderate Tory in politics, Lever’s work suggested that the Irish could never be good Britons, or successful colonists. In contrast, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, who in so many ways represents the anomalous position of the Irish in imperial terms, is presented as succeeding precisely because of his Irishness, even though he does not know what that is. The contradictions in Kim reflect the ironic relationship between the Irish and the Empire as a whole, and as such the novel can claim to be the greatest ‘Irish’ imperial novel, a term which is itself a contradiction in terms.