Unformed

It's dangerously tempting to make nice, linear chronological claims about the history of literary forms.  "X gave way to Y" would be awfully convenient, and yet the real situation is often more "X was in competition with Y, and Y became more popular" or "X was absorbed into Y, but kept going on the margins" or  "X looks like it disappeared after Y, but really we just forgot about its existence"  &c.  As you can gather, I'm thinking about Book 3 1/2, which has a slightly problematic first chapter-in-progress.  It's problematic because I'm arguing that a certain kind of religious fiction pretty much disappeared by the late 1830s, with the first shifts visible in the 1820s.  But you still have a couple of decades in which Form X and Form Y are, as it were, circling around each other, sussing out weak spots and, in general, claiming religious space.  Worse still, there's a seismic event of sorts that really demands its own (currently extant) chapter--and yet, that doesn't quite fit with a neat chronology.  Organizing a coherent narrative about a messy situation, alas, is a somewhat frustrating task...