Lithography is usually ascribed a minor role in the history of nineteenth-century illustration, relegated by the rise of wood engraving to decorative functions in such publications as sheet music covers. But its immediacy and, especially, its colourfulness gave the lithograph a visual potential as a medium for mass circulation print forms that was widely explored in the 1830s, especially by comic artists and their publishers. By 1830 technical proficiency in lithography was widespread in London, and lithographic printing formed a substantial trade. This chapter concentrates on the many series of cheap, often coarse and confrontational single plate lithographed ‘jokes’ that flooded the market in the 1830s. These gaudy prints redefined the comic grotesque for a mass readership and brought a newly analytical, if frequently jaundiced, eye to everyday urban experience. The comic lithographs of the 1830s refused the role of ‘illustration’, largely by maintaining the visual autonomy of the single plate print as a commercial entity. They provide not only an insight into the chaotic world of 1830s popular publishing but also a sustained challenge to contemporary decorum.

This chapter explores Byron’s reception through the lens of the Byronic sense of occasion. Focusing on the history of Byron’s contemporary reception, it argues that Byronic reception involves a transformed scene of reading and writing, and a transformed temporality, which is acutely attuned to a sense of occasion, stretching the moment of reception and production across a longue durée. It is a critical commonplace that Byron’s writing is about its own creation and production, but it is also about its reception. The story of Byron’s reception also tells us about the changing practices of Romantic criticism and culture more broadly. The Byron phenomenon taught its contemporaries to think of the poem as a performance, an event, an experience. It is also a kind of entourage. In this transformed scene of reading and writing, the text’s reception – always already anticipated – forms part of the entourage. The chapter examines how Byron’s works contribute to this sustained sense of the text as entourage, event, and public occasion – in furious conversation with its own past, present, and future audiences.

The contemporary fascination with comics archives also revolves around imaginary collections of invented “forgotten” comics. This chapter is not about forgeries of actual cartoonists but about imaginary constructions, fictive comics objects, and pseudo recoveries – whose transmissive function can be as important as the recirculation of actual archives. It details the stakes of this retro reflexivity by looking more closely at paratextual elements in Seth’s graphic novels and then in a more detailed close-reading of Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost, which presents itself as a playfully anachronistic work, mobilizing all the conventions of the 1920s comic strip within the publishing framework of a contemporary graphic novel. Productively fed by the many reprints of newspaper comics of the mid-2000s, Little Tommy Lost also offers an indirect critique “in practice,” reminding us of the complexities in reviving these serial objects, but also perhaps failing to take up the digital publication opportunities where such forms might find a new context.

Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South.Using theFifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.

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.

Stein used film as a model to explain the avant-garde poetics of her literary portraits to her perplexed readers. The chapter examines two early portraits, “Picasso” and “Orta,” in the context of chronophotography and early film. It also considers Stein’s theoretical reflections on her insistent style, particularly “Portraits and Repetition” and “How Writing Is Written.” Stein’s early portraits are in orientation temporal and performative (like film) rather than visual and static (like photography). They advance through sequences of similar, serially varied sentences that create the impression of an ongoing present. Stein’s cinematic form of serial variation locates meaning in the movement of its sentence permutations rather than in its mimetic capacities. Her serial sentences keep readers focused on the workings of language and the text’s temporal unfolding and thus manage to turn an awareness of representational processes into a tool to center our attention on the always elusive present moment. Stein’s use of self-reflexivity to create a sense of temporal and perceptual immediacy radicalizes the cinematic strategy of embedding immediacy effects in overtly self-referential texts.

Markets and organizations are often contrasted with each other and are sometimes even treated as opposites. But they share at least one characteristic: They are both organized. Many markets have been created by organization, and virtually all markets are organized to a greater or lesser extent; for markets to function according to the normative ideals of economists, a high degree of organization is necessary. In this chapter, the organization of markets is contrasted to other ways by which markets are formed – mutual adaptation among sellers and buyers and institutions. Organization adds substantially to the uncertainty that has been seen as a typical trait of markets. The chapter describes how different combinations of organizational elements are used in different markets. In addition to sellers and buyers, there are two types of market organizers: ‘profiteers’, who organize in order to benefit their own business; and ‘others’, who claim that they organize for the benefit of other people or of everyone. Market organization is the basis for a form of democracy on the global level – a form other than that tied to a formal organization, such as a state.

The formation of queues is an institution: it is created and managed largely by the emergent norms of those in the queue. Research on queues has demonstrated that it is more and more common for organizations to intervene in the ordering of queues. In this chapter we investigate why and how queues are organized and the tensions that arise when a strong institution becomes the subject of partial organization. As an institution, the idea of how to form a queue has strong legitimacy resting on commonly accepted values of equality and fairness. The fact that a queue is organized with one or several organizational elements does not necessarily mean that the queue as an institution is replaced by organization; on the contrary, organizational decisions may support the queue as an institution. In other cases, however, organization is a challenge to the legitimacy of the queue; instead it is the organization that uses its power to further its own interest in selecting the preferred customers from a larger number of people standing in a line. When an organization decides the order in which people are admitted, little remains of the institution of the queue.