Volume 143, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Serial Circulation: Print Cultures and Periodical Modernities

This introduction coins the concept of ‘serial circulation’ by connecting 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 idea of modern public spheres as “cultures of circulation” (2002). We first identify the long nineteenth century as 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. We then suggest that these developments can be 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. These conceptual and historical observations are followed by a preview of the articles collected in this issue and by concluding thoughts on potentials for future research.

The idea of serial circulation is difficult to reconcile with the realities of medieval practices of text production before the advent of printing. Rather than dismissing the concept altogether, however, this article considers both seriality and circulation as productive categories for analyzing medieval literature. Focusing on Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales , I argue that medieval poets were attuned to ‘serial thinking’, which manifested itself in repetition as a key formal feature of medieval literature. I introduce the concept of ‘iterative circulation’ as an alternative approach to forms of seriality and circulation within and across medieval literary works. Using the “Knight’s Tale” and the “Franklin’s Tale” as my examples, I demonstrate the usefulness of iterative circulation, which brings to the fore the fraught relationship between causality and seriality in the “Knight’s Tale”, and the tension between different kinds of rhythm in the “Franklin’s Tale”.

­­In the late fifteenth century, the arrival of the printing press in England transformed the late medieval literary scene. In this period, William Caxton, England’s first printer, cultivated a particular taste for the genre of romance amongst his audiences and attempted to establish an interconnected body of work. A close analysis of the prologues and epilogues to his prose romances reveals not only his efforts to draw explicit connections between several of these narratives but also provides glimpses into how his audience engaged with these highly popular texts. In this article, I will look at the incipient ‘culture of circulation’ (Lee and LiPuma 2002) established around the first printed Middle English prose romances. I posit that the consumption practices surrounding medieval romance, as well as the form of the genre itself, share some characteristics with serial consumption. I argue that the ‘medieval mode of reading’, which favored intertextuality and derivation, contributed to the reproduction of the topics and conventions of the romance genre in a move that anticipates the highly successful serial literature of the nineteenth century.

This article places Judith Sargent Murray’s The Gleaner in the context of U. S. publishing infrastructures of the 1790 s, exploring Murray’s gender-switching literature as a media-rhetorical print experiment. It argues that The Gleaner enacts a multi-modal drag performance that both challenges and partially reconfirms the protocols of white male identity mediation in the early republic. Addressing the centrality of impersonation, self-sentimentalization, and political indignation in early American literature, the article goes on to analyze the seriality of Murray’s collection through a close reading of the first episodes of “Story of Margaretta” (a sentimental narrative embedded in The Gleaner ). It concludes with a discussion of Murray’s transformation of classical notions of “fame” into a serial project of “recognition”, showing how central tenets and facets of early American liberalism (such as deliberation, competition, and the public sphere) were shaped by their techno-communicative conditions of possibility, particularly serial publication and serial circulation.

Although published in book form from the beginning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh (Boston 1849) participated in the community-based exchange of knowledge and entertainment that characterized mid-century Anglo-American serial circulation. In order to investigate the details of this participation, the present article focuses on one of Longfellow’s main characters, the fictitious Mary Churchill – especially on three points of Kavanagh ’s plot at which Mary demands access to recreational mathematics. With her inquisitive behavior, Mary first initiates a dialogue in the service of scientific education, thus echoing the question-and-answer setting of the earliest Anglo-American mathematics journals. Female contributors to these real-life journals may have inspired Longfellow to depict Mary’s suggestion to pose one’s own mathematical problems. The journals’ many geometry examples, finally, are mirrored in Mary’s insistence on probing solutions and thus establishing the pencil as a critical tool for problem solving, mathematical and other. 1

This article tracks how an 1846 serial, Wilfred Montressor; Or, The Secret Order of the Seven , and its illustrations, produced by and for members of the fraternal order of the Odd-Fellows, and its subsequent reprintings, including an 1855 edition by a German-language newspaper publisher in the United States, led to the creation of a hero with ties to both nativism and working-class solidarity. The serial’s author, Park Benjamin, had pioneered the pirating of British and European novels in the U. S. in his newspaper the New World . Benjamin adapted the city mystery genre for the New York Odd-Fellows’ newspaper, defending secret associations as necessary in a city where criminal and economic systems are ineffective if not corrupt. But Tompkins Matteson’s nearly 100 illustrations invited the youthful, Protestant, artisanal, and male subscribers to the weekly Golden Rule to project themselves into New York’s high and low life. Matteson’s illustrations of novel readers may have condemned their absorption in fantasy, but his pictures in the serial created seductive objects of desire that crossed ethnic and gender boundaries. Later, as a cheap novel, the illustrations and the text were both ordered more conventionally, while the fraternal image of manhood, one that attracted Germans and native-born, survived.

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.

The launch of the British Review of Reviews in 1890 saw an ambitious attempt by its editor, W. T. Stead, to reimagine the monthly miscellaneous magazine and the role of fiction within it. As the title suggests, its mission was to provide an overview of serial print, and it deployed forms of presentation that indexed, reduced, synthesized, and otherwise compressed large amounts of material for the reader. Like all other print materials, fiction was to be condensed in a bid to offer readers some engagement with fiction, but without the commitment of an extended serial rhythm. Condensed novels were one of the key features in the new monthly, which also sought to unite English-speaking readers across the globe. Stead’s vision was of a monthly that circulated far and wide and offered a universal medium through which to channel common ideas. This article explores Stead’s brief experiment with publishing condensed novels and notes that the failure of the experiment coincides with the decline of extended serial fiction in the magazines.

Seriality can be both an intrinsic logic of a text or an object and the methodology by which said logic is enacted before it is relayed to the viewer/listener/reader. This means that seriality can be used not only to explain the episodic, fragmented, or otherwise temporally lengthened nature of media and art, but also to unpack modes of production and reception that put on display entwined processes of repetition and variation, demanding loyal readership. Focusing on two poetic/artistic works of erasure, i.e., Tom Phillips A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes , I study the particular draft of seriality inherent in erasure arts and literature by narrowing down the focus on what Mel Bochner called ‘the serial attitude’. An understanding of the Bochnerian ‘serial attitude’ as a versioning tool and as what enables erasure in arts and poetry makes evident, I propose, that erasure is a repetitive act of serial layering – where each layer is there exactly because it differs from the previous and the subsequent layers in the semantic labor it is meant to perform and also in the material form it takes.

This article examines contemporary fanfiction as a special type of engagement with popular serial narratives. It proposes the concept of fractal seriality as a lens through which to gauge the proliferation and popularization of fanfiction as a potentially fruitful strategy for critiquing fiction: part of fiction’s persuasiveness inheres in an author’s ability to consciously or unconsciously set the rules of the fictional world in ways that reinforce the author’s message and their vision of the real world, while fractal seriality allows fanfiction authors to change the focus and reorient stories in ways that will engage readers of the original series while refusing to circulate key aspects of the initial worldbuilding and moral values. E. J. Lomax’s boy with a scar builds on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series not by continuing it chronologically but branching off from it in a series of “what-ifs” that broaden and deepen the wizarding world by focusing on characters, events, and circumstances that the original series has elided, oversimplified, or otherwise treated in ways that Lomax finds inadequate. VeroniqueClaire’s Volée , meanwhile, expands the action of three scenes from the Phantom of the Opera stage play into 25 chapters, realizing the potential for transformative justice already inherent, but unfulfilled, in the original.