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"The title for this book, "a World of Fiction," has three meanings, and these have continued to underpin and shape the book. The most straightforward concerns the global origins of fiction in nineteenth-century Australian newspapers. While British, Australian, and American works dominate, and have been my focus, these newspapers include fiction from many other places: Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and more. An even wider range of geographical locations are evoked in the inscription of stories, which are presented as coming from the above countries and far beyond: Belgium, Burma, Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, the list goes on. This sheer multitude of origins, real and inscribed--and the frequency of global voyages in these stories--indicates a pronounced geographical focus in the creation, publication, and reception of colonial newspaper fiction. Given that many of the original readers for these stories would have recently arrived in the colonies from elsewhere, this global consciousness suggests the role that newspaper fiction played in connecting new, Australian spaces and lives to preexisting conceptions of the world and readers' place in it"-- Abstraction, singularity, textuality : the equivalence of "close" and "distant" reading -- Back to the future : a new scholarly object for (data-rich) literary history -- From world to trove to data : tracing a history of transmission -- Into the unknown : literary anonymity and the inscription of reception -- Fictional systems : network analysis and syndication networks -- "Man people woman life"/"Creek sheep cattle horses" : influence, distinction, and literary traditions.
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