Leigh York

This talk will posit the “episode” as the primary narrative unit that shapes multi-media print narratives in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the rise of the periodical press, authors were faced with rapidly changing printing technologies and an expanding literary marketplace. Whereas earlier picaresque novels comprised series of episodes that were only loosely connected, new media conditions demanded new narrative strategies. This project looks at the ways that nineteenth-century authors began using the episode to generate complex forms of transmedia continuity that generate continual (and futural) narrative pleasure. By looking beyond its own narrative limits and asking “what comes next,” the episode conveys a storytelling gap that prompts continuation in future episodes, thus generating a potentially infinite series that, in many cases, exceeds the boundaries of text and medium. I trace the development of multi-media episodes from the eighteenth-century work of Karl Philipp Moritz to the nineteenth-century bestseller Karl May; I end by arguing that the episode continues to structure popular transmedia storytelling well into the twenty-first century, in print, online, and on screen. This paper uncovers a continuity between print media in the long nineteenth century and digital media in the twentieth and twenty-first, giving us a deeper historical view of our own storytelling practices and aligning these practices with larger shifts in how we conceive of life, pleasure, value, and politics.

Main Research Interests

• Narrative Form in the 19^th Century German Novels
• Critical Theory
• Media Studies

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