Trilby-mania, Transfictional Character

This fall, I'm presenting at NAVSA and MLA on transfictional character, which just means characters who appear in multiple texts by different authors. While transfictional characters are fascinating for all kinds of narratological reasons, they're also utterly familiar to us because of merchandising. One of the best documented nineteeth-century transfictional characters we know of is Trilby O'Ferrall of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby, serialized in Harper's Monthly.