Novels organised by tight plots are surprisingly comparatively rare – the open ends and episodic structures render narrative closure preliminary, leaving the interrelation of individual episodes amenable to retrospective reconfiguration. The essay collection To Be Continued – Forms of Narrative Continuation, edited by Ulla Haselstein (Research Area 3: Future Perfect) and Florian Sedlmeier, explores forms of creating narrative returns and follow-ups such as adaptation, adventure, parody, ramification of plots and characters, remake, serialisation and spinoff.

In her own chapter, "Of Masks and Men", Haselstein analyses Percival Everett's novel James (2024) as a compendium of different narrative and intertextual modes of continuation, with adventure as the main trajectory. Responding to African American critiques and academic readings of Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Everett's James constitutes both a re-writing of a literary classic and an adaptation of the genre of the slave narrative that echoes Twain's own parody of adventure and takes it to new horizons. Apart from demonstrating how rewriting/adaptation/parody illuminate and provide an analytical frame for each other, Haselstein also discusses Twain's canonical status, Twain criticism, constructions of the African American literary tradition, and the narrative dynamics of contemporary popular adventure. 

"On Gus Van Sant's Psycho and Other Psychos", the contribution by Frank Kelleter (Research Area 1: Competing Communities), is dedicated to continuations of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Among other aspects, the paper touches upon Hollywood's tradition of sequels and remakes, the specific seriality of Hollywood feature films, the impact of Hitchcock's original on the horror genre, and the privileging of story world over storytelling within the Psycho franchise. Kelleter's survey of the interplay between narrative seriality and media seriality in the commercial aesthetics of Hollywood's modes of continuation culminates in a critical engagement with Van Sant's 1998 remake as an untimely exercise in counterfactual media history whose 'mad' media fetishism prefigures the temporal derangements of digital (or post-cinematic) culture.

The volume has its roots in the eponymous conference at EXC 2020 which Ulla Haselstein organised with Florian Sedlmeier. It has been published as part of the peer-reviewed Anglia Book Series co-edited by Andrew James Johnston (Cluster Co-Director and member of Research Area 3: Future Perfect).

      

Ulla Haselstein, Florian Sedlmeier (Eds.): To Be Continued – Forms of Narrative Continuation. Buchreihe der Anglia / Anglia Book Series 89. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2026.