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.

The chapter explores the emergence of the American short story in the context of a “culture of wonder” that dominated the Atlantic world of print prior to Washington Irving. Although ghost stories, and tales of apparitions and witchcraft were often discarded as formless pieces, these “small tales” were widely reprinted in the pages of early transatlantic magazines, fostering sensational effects as well as transgressive stories about individuals whose behavior was outside the norm. The chapter examines the circulation of early short narratives in the context of serialized imprints such as magazines and newspapers. It focuses on popular topics such as ghost stories and sensationalistic tales. Moreover, the chapter unearths the rich archive of transatlantic storytelling, demonstrating how the short form combines oral and textual performances conditioning the nineteenth-century tale as it can be found in the writings of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.

This chapter explores the magazine culture of late colonial and early national America in order to recover the crucial role played by the short story in the periodical’s overburdened ambition to bring “cultural capital” across the Atlantic. Looking at these magazines we find the short story in unlikely places and forms – embedded within other fictions or non-fiction narratives, serialized in relationship to prized illustrations, or disguised as the “serial essay.” But while the print economy of the magazine would change dramatically by the 1840s and 1850s, resulting in the rise of the more familiar and recognizable periodical short story, the magazine short story has been there virtually from the beginning.