This chapter offers what Franco Moretti has called a “distant reading” of popular fictional narrative in the 1860s. That is, it concerns itself predominantly with charting changes in the larger units of generic form and publishing format, rather than attempting a close analysis of a limited set of canonical texts. The focus tends to fall on serial rather than volume publication, while the early career of Mary Elizabeth Braddon provides the subject of a specific case study. Such a procedure of course depends on the availability of comprehensive data sets, so that the chapter also touches on the recent growth in virtual archives and associated developments in the academic field of digital humanities, including the use of analytical methods owing more to book history than literary criticism.

A summary of the information revealed by Collin’s letters with specific examples

A review of Collins’s short fiction both in journals and in collections

The defining moment of Wilkie Collins's career occurred at the turn of the 1860s with the runaway success of The Woman in White. The novel's striking combination of respectable settings and illicit events launched the fashion for 'sensation fiction' which prevailed through much of the next two decades, thus marking a breakthrough in the marketing of fiction as a commodity form. Running as a serial in Charles Dickens's new family weekly All the Year Round from November 1859, the narrative aroused wide interest with its eerily enigmatic opening and deft manipulation of suspense, causing queues on publication day and raising the circulation into six figures. When the novel appeared from Sampson Low in three volumes for the lending libraries in mid-August 1860, it was widely advertised, sold 1,350 copies within the week and received its eighth impression before the end of the year. When the single-volume edition appeared from the same publisher in April 1861, embellished with a signed likeness of the author, Collins had to sit several times for the photographer to keep pace with the demand.

As the dust of the immediate post-Soviet transition settles, we are now better placed to begin to examine how national identities are being reforged in the fourteen borderland states of what up until December 1991 constituted the non-Russian union republics of the former Soviet Union. Having secured sovereign spaces following the collapse of the world's largest multiethnic federation, the borderland states are now embarking upon nation-building. And herein lies the paradox. The post-colonial desire to recreate national identities can facilitate solidarity, play a positive role in state-making and form a basis for popular participation in politics. A politics defined in relation to a particular national community may not in itself be incompatible with processes of democratisation. The problem arises when national or ethnic identity is predicated on a form of imagined community that reifies the importance of national or ethnic boundaries to the detriment of the wider political community. In this regard, there is as yet only limited evidence to suggest that the post-Soviet borderland states are on the threshold of entering such a post-national era in which national and ethnic identities have been superseded by understandings of cultural difference based on a broader and more inclusive vision of political community. Rather, although the scale of inter-ethnic violence as witnessed in TransDniester, Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s has now diminished, national identities continue to be caught up in power struggles, leadership elections, legislative acts and in the state distribution of social goods.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, one of the most urgent questions to emerge from the critical confusion was how the newly emerging polities would set about creating convincing identities for themselves and their citizens. It was perhaps a foregone conclusion that Russia would inherit the lion's share of the symbols and the history of the USSR and the tsarist empire; on the other hand, it was unclear what resources nation-builders in the fourteen borderland states would have to draw upon. What new tensions would arise out of the choice of symbols and myths, and which old ones would be exacerbated, or alternatively suppressed? Which of the heady mix of religion, language, ethnicity and homeland would come to the fore in any given region? The elusive, ever-shifting nature of the answers to these questions, the separate elements rearranging themselves kaleidoscopically in the very moment when a coherent pattern seemed to be emerging, has become dismayingly plain in the years since 1991. And yet the more complex the picture, the greater the urgency of the task of understanding it.

It is clearly impossible for any one individual to be conversant not only with the languages, histories and diverse political and social cultures of the fourteen new or restored borderland states, but also with the disparate academic disciplines required to arrive at a balanced picture of the changes now underway.