To Be Continued – Forms of Narrative Continuation

To Be Continued discusses forms of creating narrative continuation, such as adventure, parody, the saga format, fan fiction, seriality, spin-offs in case studies ranging from the 18^th century to the present.

Narrative Structure. Novels organized by tight plot constructions are rather rare. Episodic structures are the rule. The number of episodic sequences is not fixed, the narrative closure of episodes is preliminary, and the interrelation of episodes is open to retrospective reconfiguration, which makes additions and further narrative elaborations a constant option.

Intertextual Links. Novels can thus be seen as experiments which use the modification of existing elements and the introduction of new elements to indicate and conceptualize cultural change. Seriality and parody mark the extremely divergent forms such experiments can employ: to write on or to re-write, to quote affirmatively, ironically, or satirically are basic forms of building traditions or of revising them, and can be related to conflicts over literary, economic or symbolic capital.

For the reader, the entertainment value of a text may increase or decrease with the familiarity of a story world with its specific characters: the economy of attention, the level of affective bonding, and their consequences - identification, revulsion, or boredom - are molded by continuation.

Ulla Haselstein, Freie Universität Berlin; Florian Sedlmeier, Universität Hamburg.