Introducing Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities

1 Conceptual Considerations

This special issue of Anglia: Journal of English Philology emerges from a conference that took place at the University of Siegen in the summer of 2022 and introduced the title that now also frames this issue: “Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities”. While the focus of the conference, organized and hosted by the two editors of this issue as part of the DFG research project “Serial Circulation: The German-American Mystery Novel and the Beginnings of Transatlantic Modernity (1850–1855)”, already exceeded the timespan and genre focus of the research project, we decided to further expand the temporal and generic horizons for this volume to include, as we will elaborate below, two contributions that study pre-modern print cultures and periodical practices as well as a final article that turns to the very recent phenomenon of online fanfiction. The bulk of the contributions, however, focus on what may be called the long nineteenth century and thus on the extended moment when advances in printing technology, growing publishing infrastructures, and a broad sense of mobility connected European and North American print markets, fostering new social connections and political discourses in ways that can be usefully studied through what we want to call the ‘serial circulation’ of texts, genres, authors, and ideas that, over the course of many decades, established transatlantic ‘print cultures’ and constituted intersecting ‘periodical modernities’ marked by a particular sense of time, space, and transatlantic connectivity.^[1]

Our conceptualization of ‘serial circulation’ connects Mark W. Turner’s view of the nineteenth century as an expanding yet unruly “culture of seriality” (2019) with Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist notion of circulating “social energy” (1988) and Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma’s conception of modern public spheres as “cultures of circulation” (2002), where circulation is defined as “a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretive communities built around them” (2002: 192).^[2] In order to make these connections work, we take the theoretical implications of ‘seriality’ and ‘circulation’ seriously, suggesting that while each of them is instructive and useful for cultural and literary analysis in its own right, we have much to gain by conjoining them into one conceptual framework.

Perhaps most informative in terms of our thinking about “circulation” as a critical concept are Will Straw’s remarks about what he calls “the circulatory turn” (2010). Basing his observations on work by Clive Barnett, Straw distinguishes between two fundamentally different notions of ‘circulation’. “Models of circulation will vary in the extent to which they emphasize the controlling character of circulatory processes or work to convey their open-ended flux”, he observes:

Clive Barnett has pointed to the divergent, even contradictory, meanings which ‘circulation’ has assumed within cultural analysis. On the one hand, the word may designate a ‘circular, tightly bound process,’ the setting in place of control systems through repeated patterns of movement and the building of stable structures to channel this movement. [...] On the other hand, ‘circulation’ can suggest a ‘scattering and dispersal,’ the dissolution of structure within randomness and uncontrolled flux (Barnett 2005). The movement of news, gossip, money, commodities, and people, outwards from their places of origin or routinized departure, involves the ongoing drawing and redrawing of circulatory maps whose variability works against any sense of stable urban infrastructure. (Straw 2010: 27)

Straw notes a tension between “circulatory processes which are ‘tightly bound’ and those marked by ‘scattering and dispersal’” (2010: 27), a tension we believe is strikingly compatible with the understanding of (popular) seriality proposed by critics like Frank Kelleter. If, as Kelleter suggests in line with Umberto Eco’s (1990) seminal work on seriality, serial narrative is characterized by a dialectic of “repetition and variation” and “these two basic impulses of storytelling – the satisfaction of conclusion and the appeal of renewal – are balanced through suspense and resolution” (Kelleter 2017: 7, 9),^[3] we can see how seriality and circulation can neither be pinned down to the controlled traveling of information through a fixed circuit nor adequately described as unbound practices of proliferation and sprawl – which is why W. T. Stead’s attempt to adapt the format of the monthly miscellaneous magazine to circulate summaries of serial narratives (abbreviated versions that create a type of ‘condensed seriality’) to a late-nineteenth-century readership, was bound to fail, as Mark W. Turner shows in his contribution to this issue.^[4] Indeed, if “one advantage of ‘circulation’ is its displacement of ‘production’ and ‘reception’ from a cultural analysis which has spent too much time fretting over the relative primacy of each in the life of cultural artefacts”, as Straw maintains, and if ‘circulation’ “is not just a third level of analysis (like ‘distribution’ in the study of the cultural industries), but names the point at which production and reception have collapsed as meaningful moments” (2010: 25), there exists yet another productive overlap between ‘circulation’ and serial storytelling – the latter of which, as Kelleter has noted, is characterized by a “particularly close entanglement of production and reception” (2017: 13).

While the concept of ‘serial circulation’ has, to our knowledge, never been substantially proposed as a way of thinking through the beginnings of transatlantic modernities and more recent global cultural flows (Appadurai 1996), Clare Pettitt aims to contrast ‘seriality’ and ‘circulation’ in ways we find highly suggestive for our purposes. Focusing on the political and print revolutions of 1848, Pettitt notes:

Circulatory movement cycles around the circuit. While circulation must depend on networks to some extent already established and bounded, seriality implies a movement onwards into an unknown future. [...] Seriality implies not only movement, but connectivity across distances of time and space. Circulation can deliver novelty, but the serial can establish the new in ways that circulatory movement cannot. (2022: 30)

In keeping with Straw’s argument, however, it is plausible to embrace a more interconnected notion of ‘seriality’ and ‘circulation’ as ‘serial circulation’, where the circulatory is less circumscribed than Pettitt makes it sound (after all, circuits have to be established and adapted in the first place, and they are anything but eternally stable constructs) and where the serial is less free-floating (less independent of the circuits, or networks, that enable its circulation) than she assumes.^[5] As Sonia García de Alba Lobeira notes in this issue, the arrival of the printing press in England certainly transformed the late medieval literary scene, but it was more than a technological advance as it also fostered the development of a new, serialized ‘medieval mode of reading’.

As a third theoretical prompt (Straw and Pettitt being the first two), we turn to Stephen Greenblatt’s classical New Historicist study Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (1988), which carries the notion of ‘circulation’ in its subtitle and which moves us from circuits, networks, and infrastructures to the theatrical stage and thus to a particular type of public sphere in which the Renaissance experienced the circulation of what Greenblatt calls “social energy”:

[T]he circulation of social energy by and through the stage was not part of a single coherent, totalizing system. Rather it was partial, fragmentary, conflictual; elements were crossed, torn apart, recombined, set against each other; particular social practices were magnified by the stage, others diminished, exalted, evacuated. What then is the social energy that is being circulated? Power, charisma, sexual excitement, collective dreams, wonder, desire, anxiety, religious awe, free-floating intensities of experience: in a sense the question is absurd, for everything produced by the society can circulate unless it is deliberately excluded from circulation. (1988: 19)

While we find Greenblatt’s conceptualization of circulation, particularly its resistance to a “single coherent, totalizing system” and its embrace of the “partial, fragmentary, conflictual”, compatible with Straw’s and Pettitt’s observations^[6], we think that his notion of “social energy” is ultimately too sweeping (as he readily admits himself), and too idiosyncratic, as a framework for the kinds of cultural and literary criticism featured in this special issue.

We therefore suggest that we understand ‘circulation’ not only as the transmission of content or movement of actors and commodities, but as a dynamic process of constructing modern subjects into serially structured publics (Lee and LiPuma 2002). What we can find, say, in the serial constitution of a mediated public sphere in Judith Sargent Murray’s magazine The Gleaner, which circulated throughout the Early Republic in the United States at the end of the eighteenth century (see Frank Kelleter’s contribution to this issue), can be described as part of a set of evolving circulatory matrices through which new discursive forms, practices, and artifacts as well as networks of modern publics emerge (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003), and also as a means of describing the nexus of modern (including popular-serial) forms of periodical print communication that have shaped Anglo-American periodical cultures since the early decades of the nineteenth century (Edwards and Gaonkar 2010; Fluck, Pease, and Rowe 2011). In fact, we can follow Melissa Aronczyk and Ailsa Craig’s recognition of a need to “dislodge the concept of circulation from its traditional analytic frame as a form of transmission or delivery between unidirectional phases of production and consumption in order to recognize it as a dynamic cultural phenomenon in its own right” (2012: 93), as Wendy Jean Katz’s article in this issue about the illustrations and working-class nativist themes of the serially published city mystery novel Wilfred Montressor; Or, The Secret Order of the Seven (1846) and its German-language version, published by Friedrich Rauchfuss a decade later, indicates. Aronczyk and Craig build their argument on Lee and LiPuma’s foundational work, which leads them to suggest that

rather than conceiving of circulation in terms of the movement of discrete objects, images and people between defined points in space and time, we are encouraged to acknowledge its performative character, its active role in constituting objects and identities and spatiotemporal environments. It is in the process of circulation of cultural forms such as the novel or the financial derivative that such social imaginaries as the nation or the market are created and understood. Circulation is therefore not an effect of global desires but a central actor in global processes and understandings. (2012: 93)

Heeding Aronczyk and Craig’s assessment, we take ‘serial circulation’ to capture the long nineteenth-century as an expanding “culture of seriality” (Turner 2019), an epoch that was characterized by an essential “unruliness of seriality” (Turner 2014) and by an “unstable economy of formulas and narratives” that only eventually solidified into “fiction factories” optimized for the streamlined production of genre narratives for mass audiences (Denning 1987/1998) at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century – both in the U. S. and the UK, which constitute the focus of this volume.^[7] We see this process unfold in the heroes and villains of the mid-nineteenth-century European and U. S. American city mystery novels, as well as their gothic motifs, social themes, and political concerns, which prefigured and eventually solidified into the globally popular superheroes and supervillains of the DC and Marvel transmedia universes, as Daniel Stein notes in his contribution to this volume.

In that sense, ‘serial circulation’ appears as an increasingly popular and pervasive cultural practice of modern transatlantic media societies (Straw 2010; Aronczyk and Craig 2012), which include not only the usual suspects of serial entertainment (e. g. dime novels, film series, comic books), but also less obvious forms of periodical modernity, such as the mathematics journals Lukas Etter discusses in his analysis of Longfellow’s Kavanaugh (1849) in this issue. On the one hand, the “cultures of circulation” described by Lee and LiPuma (2002) are created by the forms that pass through them; on the other hand, these forms can only circulate if they encounter interpretive communities that provide the corresponding regimes of evaluation (Lee and LiPuma 2002; Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003). In Benedict Anderson’s (1991/2006) sense of the modern nation-state, then, the circulation of textual forms creates the conditions for media-procedural associations of different social groups into the emotionally bound collectives of imagined communities – communities that can, as Cat Ashton and Sarah Erik Sackville-McLauchlan show in their article in this issue, alienate members to such an extent that they form their own, alternative communities (here: through the ‘fractal serialities’ of fanfiction).^[8] Through such imagined communities, modern publics emerge, and they do so substantially through practices of serial narration and publication (Kelleter 2012, 2017): as media practices rooted in print cultures that historically produced periodical modernities that have proven highly conducive to transmedia extensions (Decker and Böger 2015; Meyer and Pietrzak-Franger 2022) and the intensification of transnational and global cultural flows (Appadurai 1996; Iwabuchi 2002; Jay 2010; Linkis 2022).

While this may sound rather abstract, we want to use Aronczyk and Craig’s very basic question of “how meanings are made in circulation, if sometimes in unforeseen and unintended ways”, and their interest in “the specific interaction of cultural forms with their institutional environments” (2012: 94) as a general framework for the articles in this special issue. If we understand “the dynamics of circulation itself as a driving force of global change” (Aronczyk and Craig 2012: 94), then the ‘iterative circulation’ Eva von Contzen discovers in her analysis of Chaucer’s medieval serialities or the prefiguration of now-global comic book superheroes in the serial city mystery novels of the mid-nineteenth century that Daniel Stein discusses cease to be isolated phenomena but rather appear as facets of a broader, and eventually global, evolution of ‘serial circulation’. What emerges from these and more recent examples assessed in this issue, such as Tom Phillips’ A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes in Mahshid Mayar’s contribution, can be feasibly described as expressions of what Mayar, in reference to Mel Bochner, calls a ‘serial attitude’ tied closely to notions of circulation.

2 Chapter Overview

The articles in this special issue collectively envision the nexus of periodical print cultures and serial storytelling as a decisive factor for the emergence of (trans-)national modernities. Taking the notion of serial circulation – of forms and formats, styles and contents, goods and people – as a starting point for investigating intersections of print cultures across borders and periods, the issue features scholars from various disciplines and theoretical backgrounds, including literary and cultural studies and art history.

The issue opens with Eva von Contzen’s “Iterative Circulation in Chaucer: Medieval Contexts of Seriality”, which expands our initial focus on the nineteenth-century beginnings of periodical modernities to a thorough examination of seriality and circulation in the late Middle Ages. While our assumptions draw on the mutually dependent and reinforcing processes of nineteenth-century media ecologies and economies in our understanding of print culture and beginning modernity, circulation and seriality, von Contzen develops the novel concept of ‘iterative circulation’ to describe the workings of seriality in medieval literature. Taking the concept of circulation as an interaction between aesthetic forms and interpretive audiences and focusing on seriality’s feature of repetition, von Contzen examines parts of the Canterbury Tales as instances of seriality that precede the modern media ecologies and aesthetics that have thus far been the main interpretive target of seriality studies. Unlike modern dynamics of serial circulation, iterative circulation is “a practice of repeating narrative forms and structures including motifs, symbols, topoi, characters, and plot lines within and across individual texts” (21), locating seriality primarily on the level of aesthetic forms and practices that can acquire new meaning when repeated to and interpreted by (new) audiences.

Sonia García de Alba Lobeira’s “Medieval Modes of Reading: The Circulation Culture of Late Middle English Romances from William Caxton’s Press” examines the romance genre in connection with the arrival of the printing press in late medieval England. William Caxton’s attempts to develop an interconnected body of works in the genre of romance and audiences’ consumption practices, García de Alba Lobeira argues, were early instances of a “culture of circulation” that are forerunners of the success of serial literature in the nineteenth century. Positing that the form of the romance brings with it serial forms of consumption, she develops the concept of a ‘medieval mode of reading’ that shares and anticipates essential characteristics of later forms of serial popular culture.

Moving the temporal focus to the United States and the Early Republic, Frank Kelleter’s “‘In a course of publications’: Seriality, Public Recognition, and Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner (1792–1798)” analyzes Boston author and early feminist Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner (a three-volume publication that collects essays, poetry, drama, and fiction). Through a multi-modal drag performance based on a play of pseudonyms and invested in the publishing infrastructures of the 1790 s, Kelleter argues, this gender-switching literature serves as a media-rhetorical print experiment that is capable of challenging and reconfirming the ways in which white male identity is negotiated in the Early Republic. Such politics of recognition, Kelleter maintains, are “shaped by their techno-communicative conditions of possibility, particularly serial publication and serial circulation” (56).

Lukas Etter’s “The Laughing Mrs. Churchill: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849) and the Earliest Anglo-American Mathematics Journals” focuses on the construction of interpretive communities through processes of knowledge exchange and entertainment in the middle of the nineteenth century. Combining a close reading of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s country romance Kavanaugh and its treatment of a twelfth-century treatise by the Indian mathematician Bhāskara II. called Lilawati with an analysis of the role of early Anglo-American mathematics journals in popularizing the solving of math problems for recreational and education purposes, Etter also comments on the involvement of women in the initially male-dominated realms of math and higher education.

Wendy Jean Katz’s “‘Life-like Delineations of Real Life’: Illustrating Wilfred Montressor: or, The Secret Order of the Seven, a New York City-Mystery of 1846” examines a city mystery novel assumed to have been authored by Park Benjamin and published in the weekly periodical The Golden Rule. The article looks at several versions and reprintings of this novel, including an 1855 edition by Friedrich Rauchfuss published in a German American newspaper (an important find for the study of German-language city mysteries in the United States and thus a significant insight for the editors’ research project), to examine its creation of a hero that tied the novel to nativism and working-class values in relation to the novel’s production by and for the members of the secret society of the Odd-Fellows. Katz examines Tompkins Mattheson’s illustrations for this novel as instances that allowed its audience to project themselves into the serial, and she compares later re-orderings of the illustrations and their effects. Katz’ focus on the serial circulation of illustrations opens a new perspective on the antebellum city mysteries in the United States and the effects they may have had on their readers.^[9]

Daniel Stein’s “Circulating Superheroes in City Mystery Novels: Prefigurations of a Popular Serial Figure” reads the many confluences between the transnational genre of the serial city mystery novel of the mid-nineteenth century and the superhero comics of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries as a case of ‘serial circulation’ in which initially popular literary figures, tropes, themes, and narrative structures prefigured – anticipated, prepared the ground for – a whole culture of popular serial storytelling that has become increasingly professionalized and globalized today. Discussing heroes and villains as well as gothic motives and paratextual elements in novels such as George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1844–1845), George Thompson’s City Crimes (1849), Ned Buntline’s Miseries and Mysteries of New York (1849), and Ludwig von Reizensteins Geheimnisse von New Orleans (1854–1855) vis-à-vis DC superheroes like the Batman and supervillains like the Joker, Stein makes the case for understanding three facets of circulation (fostering active reading communities; travelling narrative forms, content, and concepts across regional and national borders; constituting a network of print cultures through which these narratives lay the foundation for modern entertainment) as central elements in the emergence of periodically and serially structured print (and increasingly transmedial) cultures.

How does an editor handle serial fiction in a print medium whose format is geared towards extracting, compressing, condensing, reviewing, summarizing and indexing? Mark W. Turner’s “The Experiment of Condensed Fiction in the Review of Reviews” takes us to the end of the nineteenth century, when W. T. Stead launched the British Review of Reviews in 1890 with the goal of reimagining the monthly miscellaneous magazine, and in particular the role serial fiction plays within such a medium. In comparison to the sprawling serial narratives of nineteenth-century periodical print culture, the Review of Reviews attempted to condense fiction. Stead further wedded this idea to that of uniting English-speakers around the world through a universal medium circulating and channeling common ideas. Turner examines the failure of this project as coinciding with the decline of extended serials in magazines in general.

Providing an extensive temporal jump, Mahshid Mayar’s “Erasure and Seriality: The ‘Serial Attitude’ in A Humument and Tree of Codes” brings together seriality and fictional works of erasure. Defining erasure as a “repetitive act of serial layering” (184), Mayar’s article regards seriality both as the intrinsic logic of a given text or object and as the ways in which this logic is enacted before being presented to an audience. Mayar argues that seriality therefore offers a new perspective on analyzing modes of production and reception that rely on repetition and variation and demand loyal audiences, showcasing her findings with regard to Tom Phillips’ A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.

Finally, Cat Ashton and Sarah Erik Sackville-McLauchlan’s “Power the Dark Lord Knows Not: The Fractal Serialities of Fanfiction” turns to contemporary forms of fanfiction as a particular type of audience engagement with popular serial narratives that overcomes the traditional distinction between author and reader, or sender and receiver. Ashton and Sackville-McLauchlan develop a concept of ‘fractal seriality’ through which they assess fanfiction that critically amends its popular source texts (here: the Harry Potter series and Phantom of the Opera) and proposes alternative sets of values, consciously avoiding the circulation of certain story elements while endorsing others.

3 Concluding Thoughts

As our conceptual remarks and the chapter overview indicate, the goal of this special issue is not to provide a complete and systematic mapping of the phenomenon of ‘serial circulation’ throughout the history of print or even earlier moments in book or oral history. Rather, the idea is to introduce a concept that will prove to be productive for a broad range of texts and periods while also being compatible, or at least in dialogue with, ongoing research in relevant fields, such as seriality studies, periodical studies, and theories of modernity, transnationalism, and globalization. Yet, it is important that we acknowledge the inevitable loopholes and omissions that characterize this special issue: the contributions all focus on European (mostly British) and U. S. American materials and contexts, largely ignoring the developments of print periodicity and modern forms of popular serial narrative in many other contexts, in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and other parts of the world. We believe that this is justified because a truly global perspective would explode the scope of a single special issue and because our aim was to offer ‘serial circulation’ as a conceptual prompt for the readers of Anglia, a journal addressed to scholars from the realms of British and American Studies, English Philology, and related academic contexts. We enthusiastically invite critical responses to our introductory ideas as well as to the articles collected in this issue, and we encourage additional research that would expand our temporal, textual, and thematic scope.

In closing, we want to thank the editors of Anglia for guiding this issue through the review process and our contributors for entrusting us with their work.

This article was written as part of the DFG project “Serial Circulation: The German-American Mystery Novel and the Beginnings of Transatlantic Modernity (1850–1855)”.