Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine

Pethers, Matthew

Abstract

“The serial … is essential to every periodical,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazineobserved in its May 1866 issue. “Every magazine has its serial, and it is generally very good” (HNMM 1866, 32: 803). The truth in this statement is one increasingly recognized by contemporary literary scholars. Particularly over the last five years, on the back of and in conversation with a groundswell of theoretically sophisticated work on the phenomenon of serialized television, the study of nineteenth-century serial texts has markedly expanded and refined the foundational work done in this area during the 1990s, which for all its virtues largely used established historicist methods to extend the treatment of canonical authors into the realms of their periodical writing. 1 Yet even as media studies approaches have helped to move the debate forward, particularly by questioning the tendency to interpret the incrementally developing form of the serial as directly analogous to sociohistorical models of progress, there are many fundamental questions about the formal composition and dynamics of the magazine-object that remain unanswered. As Sean Latham, one of the most prominent voices in contemporary periodical studies, has recently and rather boldly admitted: “I don’t really know what a magazine is or how it works or even what it means to call these things texts … This is a kind of embarrassing, even damn-near existential kind of problem to have” (2017: 31). One significant barrier to such definitions has surely been the fact that the “goodness” of serial texts, to paraphrase Harper’s, still tends to dominate critical conversation and steer it toward traditional methodologies that developed through and are best suited to directing attention toward isolated examples derived from well-known writers. Indeed, a similar drag on our critical focus, pulling us into close reading over landscape-mapping, could also be said to haunt those media studies scholars who have more recently taken up the study of serialized narratives

Citation

Pethers, M. (2022). Serialization and the Narrative Scales of the Literary Magazine. In Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine. Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

• Acceptance Date: Jan 5, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Dec 31, 2021
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2022
• Deposit Date: Mar 25, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 1, 2023
• Publisher: Routledge
• Book Title: Routledge Companion to the British and North American Literary Magazine
• Chapter Number: 4
• ISBN: 9780367222819
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5415435
• Publisher URL: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429274244-6/serialization-narrative-scales-literary-magazine-matthew-pethers?context=ubx&refId=784b1af0-12ad-48a9-8e94-1f58c8d176c8
• Related Public URLs: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-the-British-and-North-American-Literary-Magazine/Lanzendorfer/p/book/9780367222819