Although a mainstay of secondary education and vernacular criticism, foreshadowing has received limited attention in narrative theory and literary historiography; when it does come up, it tends to be dismissed as simultaneously an analytically vague category and a heavy-handed, even embarrassing literary device. In his 2024 article “Reading for the Foreshadowing” (Representations 165), Daniel Hack sought to combat this disdain and neglect by tracing the history of the term “foreshadowing” and linking this history to significant questions in novel and narrative theory. He showed that only in the nineteenth century did “foreshadowing” come to be used with reference to narrative, as opposed to providential and historical phenomena—it went from being a feature of the world to a feature of texts. This shift, he argued, should be understood in relation to the classic understanding of modernity-as-disenchantment—or rather, in relation to efforts to move beyond that overly schematic model. Hack argued that as scholars rethink ostensibly settled questions in the history and theory of the novel regarding the ontological claims of the realist novel and the supposition of readerly agnosticism toward those claims, foreshadowing can serve as a fertile site for this rethinking.

In “Foreshadowing and Realism: Middlemarch’s Failures,” Daniel Hack extends this project by exploring the surprisingly prominent role foreshadowing plays in the quintessential realist novel. Hack shows that Eliot uses foreshadowing chiefly to portend failure, especially of her protagonists’ idealistic ambitions. In asking why this should be, he draws on Fredric Jameson’s argument for the heightened significance of failure in modern narrative (and, by extension, in narratives of modernity); at the same time, though, Hack shows how Jameson’s related account of “providential realism” in Middlemarch fails to register how Eliot’s use of foreshadowing undermines the difference between providential and secular cosmologies. Ultimately, Hack argues, Middlemarch cannot square its aesthetic and ethical commitments to meaningfulness with its critique of providential thinking, and Eliot’s treatment of foreshadowing reveals this failure with special force. Hack concludes by weighing the implications of this failure for our understanding of realism more generally.

Olivia Linyi Xu’s paper, “Foreshadowing in the West,” offers another perspective on the use of foreshadowing in the nineteenth-century British novel. Or rather, Xu recovers another perspective, as she traces the proliferation of foreshadowing in early twentieth-century Chinese literary discourse, when it came to signify the respective aesthetic virtues of Chinese and Western novels. For many Chinese commentators encountering Western fiction in translation, Xu shows, a deft use of foreshadowing marked both the aesthetic and ideological sophistication of the Western novel, while the Chinese novel was characterized by a lack of organizational intricacy. To show how foreshadowing acquired this critical currency during the rise of the novel in China, she focuses on the translator Lin Shu, a central literary figure who not only theorized foreshadowing as a comparative literary style but also identified and rewrote it in his translations of major Western novelists who excelled in the art, such as Charles Dickens.

Our final paper, Alison Booth’s “Foreshadowing Women’s Lives, Nonfiction and Fiction,” expands the panel’s focus generically to encompass nonfiction biography, while at the same time modeling another, quite distinct methodology for engaging in the study of foreshadowing: a digital-humanities approach. Comparing paragraphs tagged as foreshadowing in fifty-nine nineteenth-century collected narratives of real women’s lives with novels with female protagonists such as Northanger Abbey, Emma, and Jane Eyre, Booth argues that foreshadowing not only guides the experience of a text’s coherence but also affords a measure of cultural expectations. Focusing her comparisons on common techniques in nonfiction and fiction, such as anecdote of childhood promise and Persona Description foreshadowing adult achievement, Booth argues that in biographies of women—a genre that resembles domestic fiction but by contrast rarely ends in marriage—the subject is foreshadowed to fulfill her promise as narratable person. Even the pain and sorrow of death is mitigated in a narrative of retrospection that foresees the payoff of meaning, line by line.

Papers will be 18-20 minutes each, which will leave time to at least begin discussing any of several throughlines, points of comparison, and potential tensions between the papers, such as: aesthetic norms and judgments; genre; national traditions; the meaningfulness of texts and of lives; success vs. failure; the role of the nineteenth century; the affordances of different scales and methods; foreshadowing’s futures and the future of foreshadowing.

The panelists are diverse in terms of race, gender, and rank.