Ephemeral History: Periodical Form and Doubled Time in the British Novel, 1720-1830

Abstract

Ephemeral History reads the emergence of the British novel in relation to a long-overlooked aspect of the contemporaneous media environment: a growing interest in preserving and collecting media that were designed or understood as discardable. By the late seventeenth century, almanacs—initially produced to be useful for only a year—were increasingly bound together and shelved, while old newspapers and other periodicals piled up despite persistent claims that they were wastepaper. Joining close readings of novels by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley with investigations of these and other ways of treating transient documents as durable, I present a new account of one of the most notable aspects of the novel genre: its incorporation of everyday media like letters, journals, diaries, memoranda, and news-extracts into its narratives. While such embedded forms have typically been understood as authenticating devices or as reflections of a broader fixation on the present, Ephemeral History instead reads them as acts of preservation akin to the binding or filing of almanacs, newspapers, and other periodical forms. By investigating this recurrent lamination of the ephemeral and the retrospective, the periodical and the historical, I argue that the British novel was from its origins a deeply historiographical form, one that offered its readers models for understanding how the ephemeral documents accumulating around them could provide access to the quotidian life of the past.