Bigger Love

Abstract

To a greater extent than any short-form medium, serialized narratives create real-life and often shared experiences of inhabiting worlds whose long-evolving plotlines and unwieldy meanings defy our cravings for knowledge and plenitude. Comparative study of mid-Victorian-era and turn-of-the-millennium serial cultures can show how these narratives negotiate the transitions between productive and financial economies which recur within "long centuries" that otherwise differ. The "Bigger Love" described in this essay is a serialized structure and structure of feeling born of "quality" modes of production and reception during two "golden ages"—both of which coincided with periods of advancing capitalist financialization. Delineating and comparing two such periods—"the long 1860s" and "the long 2000s"—this essay explores three axes of enlargement: from the Bigger Methods of the Annales School to the Bigger Stories and Bigger Houses at work in Anthony Trollope's serialized Barsetshire novels and millennial television series such as Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer's HBO show Big Love.