What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you've never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by "rotten girls," swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden age of Chinese science fiction. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with Chinese literature and culture, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it's important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction-an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, and they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are either overlooked or off limits. The Subplot vividly captures the ways in which literature offers an alternative-perhaps truer-understanding of the contradictions that make up China itself.

Unjustly overlooked in its own time, Frank J. Webb's novel of pre-Civil War Philadelphia weaves together action, humor, and social commentary. The Garies and Their Friends tells the story of two families struggling for di| erent sorts of respectability: the Garies, a well-to-do interracial couple who relocate to Philadelphia from the plantation South in order to legalize their marriage, and their friends the Ellises, free black Philadelphians hoping to make the move from the working class into the bourgeoisie. Along the way the families confront racialized violence, melodramatic villainy, and sentimental reversals. Entertaining and fastmoving, the novel has a Dickensian mix of uncanny coincidence and interwoven personal experiences. The historical documents accompanying this Broadview Edition provide reviews of the novel along with extensive materials on slavery, the color line, and contemporary Philadelphia.

In the nineteenth century, new image-making methods like steel engraving and lithography caused a surge in the publication of illustrated books in the United States. Yet even before the widespread use of these technologies, Americans had already established the illustrated book format as central to the nation's literary culture. In The Portrait and the Book, Megan Walsh argues that colonial-era author portraits, such as Benjamin Franklin's and Phillis Wheatley's frontispieces; political portraits that circulated during the debates over the Constitution, such as those of the Founders by Charles Willson Peale; and portraits of beloved fictional characters in the 1790s, such as those of Samuel Richardson's heroine Pamela, shaped readers' conceptions of American literature. Illustrations played a key role in American literary culture despite the fact there was little demand for books by American writers. Indeed, most of the illustrated books bought, sold, and shared by Americans were either imported British works or reprinted versions of those imported editions. As a result, in addition to embellishing books, illustrations provided readers with crucial information about the country's status as a former colony. Through an examination of readers' portrait-collecting habits, writers' employment of ekphrasis, printers' efforts to secure American-made illustrations for periodicals, and engravers' reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh uncovers in late eighteenth-century America a dynamic but forgotten visual culture that was inextricably tied to the printing industry and to the early US literary imagination.