Serialization in Popular Culture

Rob Allen, Thijs van den Berg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134492121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

From prime-time television shows and graphic novels to the development of computer game expansion packs, the recent explosion of popular serials has provoked renewed interest in the history and economics of serialization, as well as the impact of this cultural form on readers, viewers, and gamers. In this volume, contributors—literary scholars, media theorists, and specialists in comics, graphic novels, and digital culture—examine the economic, narratological, and social effects of serials from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and offer some predictions of where the form will go from here.

Part 1 Victorian Serials

DOI: 10.4324/9780203762158-2

1 The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and in the Digital Age)

Mark W. Turner

DOI: 10.4324/9780203762158-3

At the close of his well-known article, “Interpreting Serials,” Umberto Eco fancifully peeks into the deep future and invites us to:

[I]magine a society in the year A.D. 3000, in which ninety percent of all our present cultural production had been destroyed and of all our television serials only one episode of Columbo had survived.

How would we “read” this work? Would we be moved by such an original picture of a little man in the struggle with the powers of evil, with the forces of capital, with an opulent and racist society dominated by WASPs? Would we appreciate this efficient, concise, and intense representation of the urban landscape of industrial America? When—in a single piece of a series—something is simply presupposed by the audience which knows the whole series, would we speak perhaps of an art of synthesis of a sublime capacity of telling through essential allusions? (Eco 100)

In other words, how would we read a piece of a series if the whole of the series remained unknown to us? This remains a provocative “what if,” as suggestive a proposition now as it was a generation ago, though his historical moment is meaningfully different from our own era of seriality. Eco was writing in the days of VHS, before the advent of popular digital media, DVDs, special box sets, laptops, iPads, pay-on-demand television, the prominence of sequelization in cinema, new forms of recording and other innovations and cultural forms which ensure that experiences of seriality and repetition are themselves always changing. Seriality, with its apparently regular patterns and rhythms, may appear to be a continuous, even collective, experience in modernity, but its forms of mediation and remediation forever reshape our experiences of everyday life.

Eco’s fantasy of the single episode speaks to a basic uncertainty about the relationship of the part to the missing whole in serial culture.¹ In this chapter, I keep Eco in mind but think about his challenge in reverse in order to consider the implications of reading and researching not a single object in a serial, but the entire field of any given serial. My focus will be on serials from the 1830s to the 1850s, a time when serial culture was rapidly expanding and coming to define the nature of print more generally. However, I am less interested in elucidating and revealing a particular history of the serial, though there is much still to be said about that; rather, I seek to shed light on some of the conceptual problems we now face in “reading” (and researching and writing about) the serial culture of the past. Although my period of interest is the nineteenth century, these problems are also relevant to studies of contemporary serial culture (cinema, television, games, blogs, etc.). My hope is that such research into the nineteenth century that thinks about the interpretative difficulties of singularity versus plurality, the relationship of the part to the whole in a culture of repetitive rhythms, will speak across and beyond seemingly self-evident definitions of scholarly “period” to resonate with those working in a range of fields. Studying the rich culture of the serial in the nineteenth century flags up methodological and other challenges that we continue to confront, admittedly in different ways, in our own twenty-first-century culture of seriality.

A Drop in the Ocean

Arguably, we are “in touch” with the material base of nineteenth-century serial culture more than at any time since the nineteenth century, and, perhaps even more than the nineteenth century itself ever actually was. Recent developments in digital technology and new resources arising out of the “digital revolution” allow us, as never before, to read (at least, theoretically) the vast expanse of the print culture of the past. As James Mussell discusses in his important study of The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (2012), large numbers of recent digitization projects that have focused on newspapers and periodicals across the nineteenth century are rapidly altering both our access to and the nature of our encounters with the material culture of the past—projects supported by a variety of national, local and private libraries (the British Library, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia, etc.), public research bodies and private foundations (the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, the Mellon Foundation in the US), higher education institutions and large corporations (Google, ProQuest, Gale Cengage).² Material that, hitherto, has been accessible mostly to a relatively small number of expert researchers and students, working in privileged libraries, is becoming more widely available, though not evenly across all scholarly communities and not without significant commercial interests and investment. By and large, the predominant strategy has been to embark on large-scale digital projects—that is, the scanning of millions of pages, converting print to digital forms, allowing searchable access to readers.³

There are many questions that arise out of this new research context, not least our relationship to the materiality of “print” in its remediated, digital form.⁴ But I would like to explore the question of scale now posed by the readily available digital resources. The upside of many digital projects is that the expanse of our print culture—available at the click of a few buttons, if not as material print then as digital image—may point to an exciting brave new world, in which we can see and “read” vast amounts of print never easily available previously. The downside is that these new resources could be a researcher’s and student’s intellectual nightmare, in which the vastness of the newly searchable “print” could radically alter our knowledge of the period and our ways of “reading.” We do not yet know, but at the very least, these new developments and resources that so fundamentally alter our understanding of the scale of print in the nineteenth century require researchers to ask new questions about what it is we do and how we do it.

In their 2006 PMLA article, “The Rise of Periodical Studies”, Sean Latham and Robert Scholes argue that as a result of digitization, “an important scholarly field, which could not be developed because no one had access to all the resources necessary to organize its study, is now near the point at which scholars around the world will be able to participate in its growth” (Latham and Scholes 518, my emphasis). They call this burgeoning field “Periodical Studies.” This is only a partially true assessment, however, since a clearly defined subfield of periodical studies within the broader field of Victorian Studies has been vibrant for roughly fifty years. Richard Altick’s groundbreaking study, The English Common Reader (1957), enlightened the scholarly world about nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, ephemera, the publishing industry and cultural production more generally, and it remains an important work. Since the late 1960s, the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals has promoted work on serials, with its own journal for scholarship, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, now called Victorian Periodicals Review (VPR). For decades, VPR has provided annual bibliographies of research being undertaken in the field, gathering together interdisciplinary work across a number of fields, though mostly literary studies and history. For a long time, then, scholars have been immersed in research related to nineteenth-century serials (daily and weekly newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines full of fiction and other material, quarterlies and other journals of serious opinion, etc.).

The research materials that have grounded scholarship in nineteenthcentury periodical studies, and through which its methodologies have been developed, have, of necessity, tended to focus on a miniscule sampling of serial material from the period, in part driven by the bibliographical and other research resources available to scholars. The Wellesley Index (1965–88, in volume form), which indexed the contents and contributors of forty-three nineteenth-century periodicals, is a wonderfully rich resource, one effect of which was to produce something akin to a canon of periodicals, unsurprisingly overdetermining the range of scholarship that was subsequently undertaken.⁵ There was nothing inherently wrong in the selection of the forty-three periodicals contained in the Wellesley, and all have a claim for our close attention; rather, those forty-three titles represent only the tiniest fraction of material that scholars might explore, and this necessarily skewed the range of research undertaken.

Similarly, indices (in volume and electronic form) that focus on single titles concentrate scholarly efforts on those titles.⁶ Interest in The Times may have made this newspaper, however significant it undoubtedly was, more central to scholarship as a source for evidence of various kinds, occluding discussion of the wider metropolitan and, especially, the regional press. In other words, the parameters of nineteenth-century serial studies have been limited by the extant research resources, but this comes as no surprise, since scholars work with what we have. While Latham and Scholes underplay the buoyancy of an already-existing and flourishing scholarship in periodical studies, at least in nineteenth-century studies, they are right to suggest that the new resources emerging from digitization present new challenges and that these challenges might best be met through innovative, interdisciplinary forms of collaboration. New conditions for scholarly research suggest new possibilities and, by implication, new methods.

The overall tenor of Latham and Scholes’ article is fairly utopian, suggesting implicitly that the sheer vastness of print culture can finally be revealed to us and that, conceptually, there will be an endpoint when the archival base of print will be stable and even complete, when “all the resources necessary to organize” serial print studies will be fixed digitally (518). But such faith in the fixity or the stability of the archive pays too little attention to the problem of scale and to the variety of material we might find when we start looking more closely. Latham and Scholes point to important electronic projects such as SciPer (Science in the Nineteenth Century Periodical Index, first released in 2005), an electronic index of science-related material in nineteenth-century periodicals, and argue that:

one of the key elements for the creation of periodical studies is already falling into place: the assembly and dissemination of a core set of objects. Now that they are readily accessible, we are prepared to begin work on a second essential element for this field: the creation of typological descriptions and scholarly methodologies. (519)

I do not accept that we have anything like a “core” of material to work with; furthermore, I think that the assumption that there is a “core” to be found within the enormity of nineteenth-century serial print is misguided. It may be that we accept too readily now the argument, derived from the influential work of Elizabeth L. Eisenstein and others, that technologies of print enable cultural “fixity.” Something gets printed, and it is forever fixed. Adrian Johns notes the way that for Eisenstein “stability” becomes “the most important corollary of the press, seeing it as central to most of the effects of print culture” (Johns 10).⁷ For Johns, this is too ordered, “too neat, too immaculate” an understanding of print within culture, which is far more contingent and uncertain (18). The idea that there could ever be anything as stable as a fixed “core” within nineteenth-century serial print strikes me as similarly problematic, and our methodologies ought to respond to the problem, rather than inscribe a false hope.

We are at a point when it is useful to ask ourselves not only how we “read,” but also what and why. Faced with the newly glaring problem of scale, we might pause to think about exactly how we approach the vastness of the “whole” of nineteenth-century serial culture, without quite sacrificing attention to the singular (comparatively microscopic) object. In serials scholarship, particularly that which has been guided by methods from my own parent discipline of “English,” we spend most of our time exploring small drops within an ocean of print—for example, a single serial novel, an installment of a magazine, a single title over a period of time, a theme or discourse across serials—though, increasingly, scholars are thinking about overlapping networks of serial print, which has the virtue of making the field of seriality even more complex to understand as a “whole.” But, we have spent rather less time in considering the vast ocean of print itself, not least because it has been difficult to fathom. In part, that has been of necessity, but now that new resources offer us millions upon millions of serial pages that we might study, it is less evident that the object of study should be a singular one, though it is equally difficult to see what approaching the “whole” actually means.

The numbers involved in thinking about the full breadth of nineteenthcentury print in Britain are daunting. The second series of the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals 1800–1900 (20 03) provides bibliographical and some modest research information for 50,000 titles, but that is only for England and not even the whole of Britain, and the larger estimate is that there were more like 125,000 titles published. Waterloo indexes 48,000 contributors to serials, but estimates that there are at least one million additional names that are unaccounted for. In seeking to document so much print, the editors are under no illusions about the ambition of the enterprise:

The number of issues of nineteenth-century English newspapers and periodicals can scarcely be imagined. It is certainly in the hundreds of millions. One scholar has gone so far as to advise in print that a comprehensive descriptive bibliography cannot be accomplished. He is probably right. Thousands of publications ran daily, weekly or monthly for decades. A few boasted a circulation in excess of a million, and very many sold tens of thousand [. . .]. As always, statistical data can be misleading: any single publication which was long-lived with a huge subscriber base might well have been less in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Victorian Serials
• Part II Serialization on Screen
• Part III Serialization in Comic Books and Graphic Novels
• Part IV Digital Serialization
• List of Contributors
• Index