Nineteenth-century mixed-race heroine fiction reflected and contributed to US racial constructions. In its antislavery iterations, it critiqued slavery by revealing the slipperiness of racial categories. Because children inherited the condition of their mothers – regardless of their fathers’ race – enslavers profited from the sexual assault of Black women. Enslavers targeted Black women for sexual violence and hypersexualized them, imagining them as always sexually available to white men. Depictions of mixed-race Black heroines in antislavery fiction addressed these problems. Scholars have discussed these concerns in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter, but less attention has been given to his three subsequent revisions of this text. This chapter reads Brown’s serialized novel, Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon as an revealing revision of Brown’s theorization of race in the USA. This revision makes important shifts in both audience and focus and anticipates further development in mixed-race heroine fiction, including writing by Black women whose work has been given less attention than Brown’s or white antislavery authors, skewing perceptions of this genre.

The aesthetics of comics is deeply linked to the history of media serialities. Modern comics were born in the newspaper and followed its periodic rhythms and exploited its logic of reader loyalty. The two historically dominant models of comics, the comic strip and the comic book, are each linked to a publication medium or format – the newspaper and the magazine, respectively – and to their logics of consumption. Many characteristics of the comic strip – the principle of gag variations, the importance of generic conventions, recurring characters, spin-off series, crossover logics – can be reinterpreted according to the industrial and media contexts in which they appear and which are aesthetically exploited by the authors. Reflection on the seriality of comics can therefore not be limited to analyses of plots or modes of graphic narration. It needs to consider media logics, including the industrial and commercial dynamics and modes of consumption they encourage. Ultimately, comics seriality engages with, on the one hand, the principles of generic seriality, which thematize these logics of production and consumption. On the other, diegetic seriality, of the recurrent character and the fictional universe, also determines the strategic choices of industrial and media players.

CH 2: Over the course of her fifty-year career writing serial fiction, short stories, and opinion pieces for an array of periodicals, Annie S. Swan repeatedly attempted to reconcile her prolific literary output and her extensive public commitments with a middle-class ideal of domestic femininity. She carefully created distinct authorial personae for each of her major publication venues, shaping both her self-representation and her fiction to address the class and gender of each periodical’s target audience. A comparison of the personae that Swan constructed and the type of fiction she wrote for the People’s Friend, the Woman at Home, and The British Weekly demonstrates how these three periodicals approached the issue of women’s work beyond the home – an issue that was particularly fraught for Swan as celebrity author, wife, and mother. Her most successful role was as counselor and role model to the primarily working-class female readership of The People’s Friend, for whom her fiction served a compensatory function, providing a much-needed escape from their daily toil within and without the home.

Brigitte Fielder’s “Radical Respectability and African American Women’s Reconstruction Fiction” begins with the serialization of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping and then considers additional work by Harper and Julia C. Collins in exploring tensions between radical anti-racism and what has become known as “respectability politics.” Tracing contemporary assumptions about respectability and its limitations in reverse chronology, Fielder asserts that African American women’s Reconstruction fiction did not simply embrace the politics and processes of respectability but often refused respectability’s directionality toward outward approval. Examining concepts of self-respect and self-interest, the chapter highlights moments when texts refuse to prioritize white and/or male characters over Black women’s perspectives – a radical deviation from the usual politics of the respectable. Fielder thus locates the roots of respectability’s critique as more fully present and available to African American women writers of the late nineteenth century than most critics have acknowledged.

This chapter compares the longevity of imaginary worlds such as Brontë’s Angria and De Quincey’s Gombroon to Thackeray’s obsessive revisiting of a single novelistic setting over multiple works. For instance, the protagonists of Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Phillip are all alumni of a fictional Grey Friars School which connects an expanding network of characters from across his oeuvre. Through his critical writing, I show how Thackeray was concerned about the affective pull of a familiar, imaginary place on the attention of his ever-baggier serial novels; a problem I argue he explores in The Newcomes, a novel about past relationships into which the characters of previous novels repeatedly intrude. Thackeray’s story about these affective entanglements suggests not only a reassessment of his uses of form, but also the conflicting uses of the novel in general, torn between its status as a literary work and as the medium for a fictional reality.