Episodic Poetics

Matthew Garrett is Assistant Professor of English & American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Contents ; Introduction: Reading the Episode in the Early Republic ; The Episode between Part and Whole ; Telemachus's Doubt: Toward a Theory of Episodic Poetics ; The Whole against the Parts: Narrative Theory ; From Event to Episode: Historical Poetics ; The Hillock and the Mountain ; Chapters ; Chapter One: The Poetics of Constitutional Consolidation ; Complexity and Consolidation: Out of Many, One ; Common and Finer: The Legacy of 1787-88 ; The Chain of Reading: Commerce, Episodic Poetics, Politics ; Hierarchy and Literary Form 1: Commerce and Contagion ; Hierarchy and Literary Form 2: Governing the Splintered Society ; Hierarchy and Literary Form 3: Faction as Form ; Mercantile Time and the Periodical Plot ; Debt and the Rhythm of Exchange ; Unreadability and Nationalism's Chain of Reading ; Chapter Two: The Life in Episodes ; Structure and Dispersion ; Erratum and Episode: Duration and Narrative Binding ; Character and Competition, Success and Failure ; Society, Mischief, and the Episode ; Experience, Selection, and Narrative Unity ; Chapter Three: The Fiction of Hesitation ; Reading the Episode in the Novel ; Adventure and Didacticism ; Incipits and the Incitement to Reading: From Clarissa to Constantia ; Against the Episode: Morality and Form in the Literary Market ; Nothing Happens ; Endless Prolixity ; Episode versus Futurity ; Episode and Ideology ; Chapter Four: Miscellany and the Structure of Style ; Commodity Writing ; Whim-Whams on the Market ; Criticism and the Work of the Writer ; Salmagundi: An Arthrology of the Literary Miscellany ; The Rejection of Reference ; Volubility and Formal Compromise ; Appendix to Chapter Four: Table of Contents and Collation of Salmagundi ; Conclusion ; Works Cited ; Index