Weekly Journal #3 (September 15, 2016)

     Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey are both comprised of short chapters, some of which do not break even two full pages. Each tends to deal with one specific event, like a conversation, or a dinner, or a ball, so that the story is told in an almost episodic way. At the time that Austen wrote her books, the novel was itself a novel genre, and her decision to tell her stories in this way was an innovative and overt one that took advantage of the novel's format and influenced what it has become. Modern web series, like Carmilla (a comedic, modern retelling of Sheridan Le Fanu's novel of the same name, featured above), are a particularly new and contemporary genre of storytelling. They follow a very similar format, with episodes that last only a few minutes and tend to deal with one event at a time. This format may very well have been influenced by the format which Austen's novels helped establish. Austen's novels shares similarities with web series like Carmilla in that both are early examples of new genres that served to pioneer their respective genre's format and structure.