While scholars generally use the concept of transfictionality to describe narrative crossover between separate works, this limitation does not apply in the eighteenth century, when publication in multiple installments and evolving ideas about the concept of copyright made created transfictional relationships within individual works.
However, as my analysis will show, the transfictionality of this eighteenth-century text derives from the coexistence of two narrative structures within a single work. Material boundaries and transfers of authorship do not suffice to create transfictionality in the eighteenth century because in the pre-Revolutionary period, authors had no more claim on their products than any artisan: once narrative ideas took textual form, they were available to others to use as they wished.
These insertions are crucial to making the text transfictional. Thus, we are right to think that our society presents a unique conjunction of these phenomena, as Jenkins has suggested.
However, transfictionality is not new, nor is its association with serialization. Rather, now as in the past, these phenomena occur in certain ways at different times because of the evolving relationship between the producers of texts and their audiences, as mediated by modes of production and distribution.
The nineteenth century provides evidence of serialized narrative fiction predating electronic broadcasting, and of the link between serialization and transfictionality e. In fact, publication in installments has been a mode of production of narrative fiction and a source of transfictional phenomena since the beginning of the seventeenth century.
