This chapter argues against the view of Perry 1967 (to some extent endorsed by Reardon 1971) that the novels were popular literature, written for a juvenile readership and ‘for the edification of children and the poor-in-spirit’: rather, it suggests, the intertextuality with high literature of the classical period and the level of education it implied point to an elite readership, among whom some of the few women to receive such an education were doubtless numbered.

Wallace’s ambivalent engagement with high postmodernism is by now axiomatic in criticism, but his relationship to more immediate literary influences is less well understood. This chapter traces Wallace’s network of twentieth-century intertextuality beyond the familiar territory of his troublesome inheritances of Barth, Pynchon and Updike, focusing particularly on his entanglement in the written cultures of the 1980s. Much of the critical work that situates Wallace as a postmodernist heir focuses on the formal innovation and experimentation in his writing; this chapter broadens out to consider geography, motif and theme as well as form and idiom. More particularly, the chapter places Wallace in the context of the “Brat Pack,” arguing that his writing, animated by a spirit of what Jill Eisenstadt called “excess and defiance,” owes as much to the literary group that came of age during the 1980s as to the postmodernist patriarchs more commonly discussed. Taking as a point of departure the early writing, especially The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair, in which many of these formative influences are more clearly visible than in the more mature work, this chapter considers the ways in which Wallace interacted with his own milieu and immediate forebears. Following the recent work of Thompson and Boswell in particular, the chapter also refers to Wallace’s own writing about his predecessors and peers, in which he often reflects, and indirectly reflects upon, the primary tendencies and themes of his own output; indeed, this chapter argues that the essays on other writers of the twentieth century are as revealing in respect of Wallace’s own writing as any of the overtly self-reflective/directive pieces. This chapter operates in conversation with the other chapters in this section, arguing that any attempt to interpret Wallace’s writing must be informed by an understanding of his complex critical, cultural and intertextual networks.

This essay examines the importance of unoriginality in nineteenth-century American literature, showing how imitation and conventionality affirmed writers’ respectability and provided important legitimizing credentials. By way of illustration, this essay considers the career of Washington Irving, who presented himself as a guardian of literary tradition and repeatedly narrated the virtues of allowing the past to shape the future. As Irving’s career evidences, nineteenth-century readers did not particularly prize originality but instead found value in the familiar and conventional.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that the nineteenth-century medical record undermines the idea that each person could have only one sex. Throughout the period, several doctors made a stand for “true hermaphrodism,” many more could not identify the sex of their living patients, and “experts” constantly disagreed not only about findings, but also about how best to establish sex in unclear cases. Precisely because no one method for determining sex proved entirely foolproof, doctors and medical forensics experts often relied on narrative to support their claims – a narrative that closely mirrors the one being developed simultaneously in contemporary fiction, and especially, but not exclusively, by realist fiction. Herculine Barbin’s memoirs (the only extant memoirs of a nineteenth-century intersex person in Europe) find their literary corollary in popular fiction that shares much with the creativity and exploitation of narrative techniques in the medical record. Newly uncovered case studies challenge the longstanding representation of the rigidly polarized binary in nineteenth-century France as well as the Foucauldian thesis of “true sex.” Patients sometimes made their own sex determinations, or sought out multiple doctors in order to meet their needs.

Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the wide dissemination in Ireland of British popular literature (including penny dreadfuls, educational books, newspapers, and magazines) prompted an intensification of activities by Irish writers keen to preserve and support a distinct Irish literary tradition. Such activities ranged from W. B. Yeats’s efforts to construct a national canon centred on the folklore of an ancient Ireland predating English colonisation, to the nationalist vision of a new Gaelic Irish culture, predicated on Catholicism and the Irish language, promoted by figures such as D. P. Moran. There was of course much discussion, in this period, about how exactly Irish literature could define itself against British literature. Yet at the same time, even among many separatists, there was a very strong sense of attachment to English literary culture. This chapter describes the complex patterns of influence and resistance that shaped both British and Irish literature between 1900 and 1920 by examining some of the popular, periodical, pedagogical, and literary texts that were central to the traffic in ideas back and forth across the Irish sea.

This chapter examines the role of magical realism in the literary marketplace with regard to questions of aestheticism, commodification, escapism and exoticism. It draws on literary texts (Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet) together with their paratexts (such as websites, author comments and interviews, publicity material and reviews) and argues that the appeal of magical realism as a commercial label must also be taken into account when we speak about the cultural work performed by this mode. This is not in order to evaluate and judge specific texts in comparison with others, but because readers and their predilections, and the appeal of what is often called 'fabulist narration' in the description of magical realist books, decisively influence the effect of magical realist literature.

This chapter considers nineteenth-century Irish Gothic literary production, beginning with the Romantic-era ‘trade Gothic’ and culminating in the ghost stories of the fin de siècle. Acknowledging the significance of the texts that have now become synonymous with ‘the Irish Gothic’, the argument nevertheless probes the primary position they have been accorded in Irish literary historiography, questioning the process of literary canonisation that has marginalised large swathes of Irish Gothic writing. It thus offers an analysis of lesser-known texts that highlight the diverse range and scope of Irish engagement with the Gothic mode, from the ‘first wave’ Gothics (1790s to early 1800s) that were often condemned as mere imitations of Ann Radcliffe, to mid-century periodical publications that demonstrate the continued influence of the Gothic mode in Ireland even after the demise of ‘the Gothic novel’. It furthermore queries the understanding of Irish Gothic as a predominantly Protestant literary mode written almost exclusively by men, exploring the rich body of Catholic Gothic texts as well as the central contribution made by women writers to the mode’s development.

Recent critical developments in the field of intermodernism have opened new spaces for enquiry in mid-twentieth-century British and American writing, elevating the impact and status of several non-canonical texts typically considered as ‘middlebrow’. Intermodernism re-evaluates the political, even radical, potential of such material in the social environment of its time. This chapter explores the extent to which it offers a viable model for reconstructing the literary landscape of mid-twentieth-century Ireland, as a means of recuperating ‘minor’ novelists of the period, such as Dorothy Macardle, but also of reinterpreting the apparent creative hiatus in the 1940s and 50s, and recognising, in the place of modernist ‘aftermath’, a valuable literary circuitry founded largely on the strength of the ‘middlebrow’ novel. In rereading the period between 1940 and 1960 in particular, this chapter will discuss the definition of the nation in terms of its rural identity and explore the extent to which a supposedly conservative revivalist pastoral, in the work of writers including Walter Macken and Mary Lavin, in fact disguises the potential of a radical or resistant intermodernism.

This chapter considers the new vernacular literature that circulated in the Mongol period, both Turkish works and those expressed in a simple accessible Persian aimed at a wide audience beyond the court. It shows how the concern with the battle against unbelief penetrated not just political but also increasingly religious discourse, as attested by this religious literature which is both evidence for and a product of the process of Islamisation. Concern with holy war (ghaza) were not limited to the Ottomans’ frontier with Byzantium, as is widely thought, but permeated works produced across Anatolia, including those written by Sufis. It thus argues against the widespread paradigm that sees Sufism as a more ‘Christian-friendly’ bridge to Islam.