Recent publications have emphasized that serial modes of storytelling, publication, and reception have been among the driving forces of modern culture since at least the first half of the nineteenth century.1 The present volume—which covers Victorian serial fiction from Charles Dickens to G.W.M. Reynolds, the French feuilleton novel from Eugène Sue to Ponson du Terrail, American newspaper and magazine fiction from Susan Warner to E.D.E.N. Southworth, and city mystery novels from Sue and Reynolds to George Lippard and George Thompson—demonstrates that much of what scholars take for granted as central features of current serial storytelling can be traced back to the time between the 1830s and the 1860s.2
Christoph Lindner notes in his foreword to Serialization in Popular Culture: “Serialization is an endemic feature of our twenty-first century, hyper-mediated world”; it “has achieved new levels of cultural embedding and new forms of technologized expression” (ix). Lindner is certainly correct. Yet, as we can see from the work we feature in the present volume, the “logic of the serial” and the “drive to serialize” (ix) that shape much of what we now recognize as modern mass-mediated popular culture have their roots in the middle of the nineteenth century. The 1830s–1860s constitute the period when new printing techniques enabled the mass publication and wide dissemination of affordable reading materials, when literary authorship became a viable profession that included the rise of “industrial literature” and “fiction factories.”3 It was, too, the era when reading for pleasure became a popular pastime for increasingly literate and socially diverse audiences, and when previously predominantly national print markets became thoroughly internationalized and interconnected.4 Moreover, these four decades mark the time when the term “popular culture” first appeared.5
The city mystery novels that cropped up in the 1840s represent one paradigmatic example of a new nexus of mass newspapers, serial narration, and popular genre formation. In the wake of the unprecedented success of Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris , serialized in the conservative newspaper Le Journal des Débats between 1842 and 1843, a great number of city mysteries appeared across Europe (especially France, Great Britain, and the German-speaking regions) and the United States. In Great Britain, G.W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844–1846) became a public sensation, while George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall became America’s first bestseller (Reynolds , “Introduction,” vii). These serialized sensational novels adapted the narrative formulas and basic storylines of Sue’s roman feuilleton to specific linguistic, regional, cultural, social, economic, and political contexts, and they translated Sue’s Parisian setting to places such as Hamburg, Leipzig, London, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and San Francisco, as well as smaller cities such as Lowell and Fitchburg.6 As scholars have recently discovered, even Walt Whitman wrote at least one city mystery novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography, which underscores the pervasiveness of the genre on the antebellum literary market.7
The city mystery novel was perhaps the first transnational and multilingual genre of popular serial fiction (see Stein, “Serial Politics”). Feuilleton novels such as Les Mystères de Paris created a veritable “mysterymania” (Crowquill quoted in Chevasco 137), circulating quickly and widely across national borders and literary traditions by way of imports, translations, and adaptations.8 As “loud texts,” in Gunter Süß’s terminology (cf. below 162)—that is, as texts that, consciously or unconsciously, put pressure on the incongruities between majority discourses and the diverging experiences of marginalized individuals or groups by interfering with the official enunciations of national identity—they entered and reshaped the public sphere by sensationalizing all aspects of urban life and tying the lived experiences of readers to larger (i.e., municipal, regional, national, transnational) narratives of social exploitation and political corruption. They depicted spectacular events in spectacular narratives that ushered in the boulevardization of modern media culture (Hülk, cf. below 56) by addressing their readers simultaneously as political subjects9 and as consumers, often voyeuristic ones, of the pleasures offered by popular serial entertainment.10
These city mysteries became an integral and active part of what Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray refer to as “the transatlantic publishing world” and what Mark W. Turner describes as a “global culture of seriality” (cf. below 130 and 196), which came to fruition around the middle of the nineteenth century and evolved into a full-fledged media world (print and electronic) by the end of the century. This media world, as Norbert Bachleitner suggests (see below 20), provided orientation and a sense of certainty in times of political liberalization and increasing social mobility. It did so in terms of content, telling stories about this changing world and thus encouraging readers to transfer themselves imaginatively into this world by identifying with characters and recognizing the verisimilitude of fictional storyworlds with their own lifeworlds on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (depending on the periodicity of a particular publication). More important, they offered producers and consumers a format and forum for participating in this media world, either as authors, editors, or publishers, or as readers who could reflect and comment on their experiences and could anchor their hopes and anxieties in specific practices of serial engagement.11
Such serial engagement, as Turner argues in this volume, feeds on a tension between the new and the familiar, between reliability and surprise, or repetition and variation, imitation and innovation, in a narrative process that oscillates between a conservative and a progressive pole (cf. 199).12 Bachleitner further speaks of the feuilleton novel’s backward orientation on the story level, where narratives frequently revert to stereotypical depictions of races, classes, and genders and where they frequently use retardation to preclude the premature conclusion of the narrative, as well as on a contextual level, where their popular—and very often populist—interventions into the politics and the social reform designs of the day often manifest a profound “ambivalence toward progress” (cf. below 46). But then again, as Tanja Weber (taking a cue from Roger Hagedorn’s seminal essay on seriality) suggests in this volume, serial storytelling has always been a central means of popularizing new media and reaching new audiences, affording it a degree of potential progressivity that, for instance, in David S. Reynolds’s reading of George Lippard (“Deformance”), may become subversive.
The chapters in Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective collectively argue that popular serial storytelling (fiction and nonfiction) in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s was a near-ubiquitous transnational mode of communication, one that drove and was driven by technological innovation, shifts in the organization and workings of reading publics, and the popularizing effects of particular narrative tropes, modes, and formats. These studies respond to Patricia Okker’s call for “further research on serial fiction” (Transnationalism 2–3) by covering a broad canvas of mid-nineteenth-century serial storytelling, including but also venturing beyond the city mystery genre by examining short stories, magazine fiction, abolitionist gift books, household books, travel writing, journalism, and illustration.13 Moreover, they cover all major forms of serial publication: newspapers, pamphlet editions, and magazines or miscellanies.
Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative therefore embraces as well as extends Okker’s largely America-centered focus on serial fictions that “navigat[e the] local, national, and transnational” and point to the existence of “a larger transnational community [of authors, publishers, and readers] dispersed across regional and national borders” (Transnationalism 2). It does so by considering the popular serial cultures of France, England, Germany, Austria, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States, expanding the scope ...