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

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...