ABSTRACT
Sean Latham brings us to the question of the different narrative scales that exist within magazines and how they interact. Importantly, if the installment emerges from and negotiates with other narrative units during the long history of the literary magazine, it is important to note that this particular narrative unit seems more period-bound and more transient than its rivals. Samuel Richardson, like many early novelists, uses the letter, which would become a key narrative unit in the magazine as well as a prototype for the installment, while Defoe uses no chapter breaks at all. In essence, what magazine editors and magazine writers had come to learn by the mid-nineteenth century was that the fictional installment could serve as a key device for fostering ongoing readerly engagement. The caption—the smallest textual unit in the magazine beyond its overarching title—gets scaled up in the hands of the instalment.
