This book establishes surprise as a key Emersonian affect, and demonstrates its significance for transatlantic modernism and the philosophy of pragmatism.

This book shows how serials deployed the repetition of plots and the traumas representing the sources of women's anxieties and pain. It addresses how American literature scholars engaged with expanding the range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's novels, especially as those fictions are available on HathiTrust and other digital services.