It is fifty years since Gunter Muller's essay on the distinction between erzahlte Zeit (the narrated time) and Erzahlzeit (the time of narrating),[1] and in the intervening period narrative theory has preoccupied itself fruitfully with relations between the two. Yet the latter category has in general been seen as an awkward fiction, existing only as some vague extrapolation to be made from a measurable quantity of text. Gerard Genette devotes three chapters of his Discours du Recit to analysing 'relations between the time of the story and the (pseudo-) time of the narrative', but he signals his anxiety in the parenthesis: the second feature is no more than a convenient inference, mere '(pseudo-) time' as opposed to the real thing, because 'written narrative exists in space and as space', and 'has no other temporality than what it borrows, metonymically, from its own reading'.[2] He develops this reservation when insisting that the real duration of a narrative, as opposed to the space it occupies on paper, is necessarily unquantifiable: 'What we spontaneously call [the duration of a narrative] can be nothing more [. . .] than the time needed for reading; but it is too obvious that reading time varies according to particular circumstances, and that, unlike what happens in movies, or even in music, nothing here allows us to determine a normal speed of execution' (p. 86). In this Genette gains the agreement of Paul Ricoeur. 'What we are measuring, under the name of Erzahlzeit, is, as a matter of convention, a chronological time, equivalent to the number of pages and lines in the published work', writes Ricoeur in Time and Narrative, and he finds consensus between both Muller and Genette in their use of this term 'to be the equivalent of and the substitute for the time of reading, that is, the time it takes to cover or traverse the space of the text'. Indeed, the major revisions proposed by Ricoeur to the positions of both these predecessors begin from the same assumption: 'I shall not go back over the impossibility of measuring the duration of the narrative, if by this is meant the time of reading. Let us admit with Genette that we can only compare the respective speeds of the narrative and of the story, the speed always being defined by a relation between a temporal measure and a spatial one.'[3] There can be no doubting the theoretical power of these studies, and no doubting the light they cast on the complex temporal relations between narrative and story in particular texts (A la recherche du temps perdu in Genette's case, to which Ricoeur adds Mrs Dalloway and Der Zauberberg). Yet by using such terms as 'reading time' or 'the time of reading' in this imprecise way, or by subsuming these terms within the category of Erzahlzeit or the time of narrating, they miss a further distinction available only to a narratology that looks beyond the text to consider its conditions of publication and reception. Rigorous scrutiny is turned by Genette on the relations (and specifically the variations and distortions) of order, duration, and frequency that exist between narrated story and narrative discourse in his chosen example, without significant reference being made to the way in which the elaborate interplay between these categories is complicated, at least for Proust's original audience, by a third temporal feature: the progressiveness of the work's disclosure between publication of Du cote de chez Swann in 1913 and that of Le temps retrouve fourteen years later. Yet publication over time is not a phenomenon confined to the exceptional category of the roman fleuve, and in Britain the serialization of individual novels (either in independent numbers or magazine instalments), though far from universal, is among the defining features of the genre in its classic (Victorian) period. When in this context we consider a category such as Genette's duration (which measures the acceleration or deceleration of the narrative text in relation to the events narrated), it becomes clear that in many cases the schedule of first publication, and thus the time of reading for the original audience, is a distinct feature that further complicates the experience of temporality in a narrative text. …