Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848

Abstract

Seriality studies has blossomed over the past ten years or so, taking shape as a coherent set of methodologies in book and print-culture history, literary criticism, and media studies. If it has not yet achieved the explanatory comprehensiveness of such well-established approaches as queer studies and narrative studies, seriality studies is poised to join them as a significant interdisciplinary mode of thinking about textual forms. Subjects for seriality studies now range from daily comics to twentieth-century daily soap operas, from HBO shows to Victorian part-issue novels, from film sequels and remakes to intermedial adaptations. Broadly speaking, there are three leading approaches to serials. A poetics of serial form has emerged in such work as the formalist chapters in Robert C. Allen’s (1985) Speaking of Soap Operas, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge’s (2018) exposition of the place of illustrations in Victorian serial forms, and the detailed analyses of complex TV serials that Michael Z. Newman (2006), Jason Mittell (2015), and Sean O’Sullivan (2010) have elaborated. A second approach focuses on the place of serial formats in the media industry, their reception by audiences, and their circulation within popular culture. Grounded in the histories of Victorian serial publication practices established by Robert Patten (2006) and John Sutherland (1995), Linda Hughes and Michael Lund’s (1999) study The Victorian Serial and Hughes’s (2014) work on nineteenth-century periodicals are examples of this second approach, as is Graham Law’s (2000) Serializing Fiction in the Victorian Press. Jennifer Hayward’s (2009) cross-media account of serial productions from Dickens to twentieth-century pop culture, as well as my own (Warhol 2003) feminist-narratological take on popular serial forms, traces commonalities between the cultural work done by nineteenth-century and later serial forms. A more recent expression of the second approach is the actor-network theory practiced by Frank Kelleter (2017a, 2017b), Ruth Mayer (2014), Kathleen Loock and Constantine Verevis (2012), and others on serials broadly conceived, including such forms as sequels, remakes, and adaptations from the nineteenth century to the present.Clare Pettitt’s title might imply that her new book contributes to a poetics of Victorian serial form, but that is not her project. Serial Forms connects in tangential ways with both of those general approaches, but Pettitt’s mode is more closely allied with a third kind of seriality studies that thinks of form in the sense most recently elaborated by such scholars as Benedict Anderson, Jonathan Kramnick, and Caroline Levine, as a mode of discourse that both reflects and influences larger ontological and epistemological patterns in the surrounding culture. Some precedents can be found in the work of Iris Marion Young (1994) on serial gender and in essays by Mark W. Turner (2006, 2014), who theorizes a relationship between the midcentury rise of serial form and the rapidly changing Victorian sense of diurnal time. Though Pettitt does provide a great deal of detail about the industrial production and commercial circulation of the early nineteenth-century series she focuses on, she is primarily interested in how these serials contributed to the formation of “a kind of knowledge . . . that is political, bodily, and historical: a knowledge about being in time” (5–6). Unlike previous work on nineteenth-century serials, her book hovers over the beginning of the century, before mass communication or mass culture. For Pettitt, seriality structures a particular form of political identity that is not necessarily a capitalist identity. She argues that seriality as a daily practice is responsible for making “political subjects” out of people who had not performed that identity before, or at least for creating “the feeling of being part of a daily politics for more and more people” (8).Pettitt’s project is ambitious. Her argument requires seriality to do a tremendous amount of cultural work: Seriality is about the reformatting of social and political experience. Seriality is a way of understanding the world, and it is fundamental to the emerging biopolitical regime of philanthropic and governmental reform in the 1840s. Seriality is related to, but not identical to, the weaker forms of “serialization,” and it is about much more than text and print, although text and print are very important to its growing hegemony as a form. (19)Indeed, Pettitt writes that Serial Forms is the first in a planned trilogy that will include the volumes Serial Revolutions (focusing on the aftermath of 1848) and Serial Transmissions (looking at literature and “other technologies” between 1848 and 1918, on a global scale) (22–23). The present volume encompasses seven substantial chapters, each focusing on an aspect of seriality in the early nineteenth century that has not yet made its way into Victorian seriality studies, from the multimedia productions surrounding the novels of Sir Walter Scott, to the British public’s obsession with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, to the promotion of a progressive worldview through the circulation of a radical-liberal periodical called Howitt’s Journal. Byron, Dickens, and Carlyle also make their way into Pettitt’s chapters, but so do ordinary readers of newspapers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And if Dickens is the go-to author for scholars of Victorian seriality, Pettitt’s interrogation of Byron’s poem about a shipwreck that was in the news and her reading of Carlyle’s anxieties about the “massification” of the British public in the context of market capitalism are absolutely original.One of the book’s greatest strengths is Pettitt’s conscientious inclusion of “ordinary persons,” whom she names as “the focus of this study” in her introduction (13). Fully aware of the paucity of firsthand evidence for what nonelite nineteenth-century British people read or how they thought about what was read aloud to them, Pettitt looks carefully through authors’ biographies and periodicals’ publication histories to find the written traces of the people who were to become political subjects through their contact with seriality. Her discussion of the origins of “news” in British culture is fascinating, as she outlines the time lag between the printing and circulation of newspapers and broadsides—particularly in the provinces—and the actual events they reported. She illustrates brilliantly the difference between today’s concept of news as a flow of near-simultaneous reporting of events and what “news” meant when a person might read only week-old newspapers, or read the same newspaper over and over, or read a broadside written about a hanging and printed before execution day to be distributed to the crowd at the gallows. Pettitt’s analysis of print media’s increased outreach to semiliterate readers through larger typefaces and more illustrations backs up her claims about the growing influence of seriality across social class, and it lends support to her larger point about seriality’s impact on political subjectivity.While Serial Forms is not a source for readers seeking the formalist analysis that the title may imply, it is a valuable and original investigation of noncanonical serials in the early nineteenth century. It is also a significant contribution to the conversation about form, time, and politics that extends beyond seriality studies.