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The Victorian Serial Novel and Transfictional Character

In this essay, I argue that transfictional characters are most explicitly a function of seriality. I ask how the Victorian serialized novel and adaptations across media can provoke literary scholars to theorize how audiences are both able to grant the persistence of a character across texts while also allowing that character to experience conflicting storylines. Transfictionality refers to the migration of fictional entities across different texts that do not necessarily share the same author. I suggest that serialization prepares audiences to recognize the “object permanence” of character, and conclude by provisionally suggesting that, rather than modeling character on implied humans, a better model for transfictional characters might be dolls.