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Circulating Superheroes in City Mystery Novels: Prefigurations of a Popular Serial Figure

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Published/Copyright: April 16, 2025
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Abstract

This article develops a notion of “serial prefiguration” that connects the evolutionary dynamics of popular serial narrative with a multi-level understanding of circulation as a) the extent to and means through which certain stories reach large audiences and foster reading communities that verbalize their responses to these stories; b) the travelling of narrative forms, content, and concepts of superhero crimefighting through genre narratives that transcend regional and national borders; c) the constitution of networks of print cultures through which these narratives create a “circulatory matrix” (Gaonkar and Povinelli 2003) or “cultures of circulation” (Lee and LiPuma 2002) that function as the foundation for modern entertainment and have delivered the blueprint for popular serial storytelling since the mid-nineteenth century.

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Published Online: 2025-04-16
Published in Print: 2025-04-09

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Preliminary Remarks
  4. Introducing Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities
  5. Iterative Circulation in Chaucer: Medieval Contexts of Seriality
  6. Medieval Modes of Reading: The Circulation Culture of Late Middle English Romances from William Caxton’s Press
  7. “In a course of publications”: Seriality, Public Recognition, and Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner (1792–1798)
  8. The Laughing Mrs. Churchill: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849) and the Earliest Anglo-American Mathematics Journals
  9. “Life-like Delineations of Real Life”: Illustrating Wilfred Montressor; Or, The Secret Order of the Seven, a New York City Mystery of 1846
  10. Circulating Superheroes in City Mystery Novels: Prefigurations of a Popular Serial Figure
  11. The Experiment of Condensed Fiction in the Review of Reviews
  12. Erasure and Seriality: The “Serial Attitude” in A Humument and Tree of Codes
  13. Power the Dark Lord Knows Not: The Fractal Serialities of Fanfiction
  14. Reviews
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