Serialization in Popular Culture ed. by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (review)

If the title of this book does not immediately identify its relevance to periodicals research, its contents repeatedly demonstrate the value of trans-media studies and fresh approaches to media history. This collection is notably international, which makes for a productive variety of nationally tinctured methodologies. Contributors from the Netherlands (six), the United Kingdom (five), and Germany and the United States (one each), draw on British and American media over three centuries. By calling attention to the role of serialisation in the development of modern mass media and the “transformation of a specific communications technology into a popular media form,” the volume reflects the editors’ contention that serialisation is trans-historical and also trans-medial (1). Beginning with “Victorian serials” (periodicals, fiction, and manuals), it moves on to serialization on screen (television, film, and convergence products), in comic and graphic novels, and finally to digital serialisation (computer games, encylopedias, and video games). The phenomenon of serialisation is probed remorsefully but productively in many guises.

Most of the essays are directly related to key questions in our field, such as the phenomena of disruption and continuity, seriality and time, and deferral and completion. It also compares the open-ended narratives of the press to the closed narratives of most fiction and the material book. It discusses numerous examples of trans-media movement between serial and other forms in video, film, and comics, which is analogous to the movement between serials and books. It also introduces critics and theories from other fields. The quality of the essays is commendably even, and the volume includes at least two outstandingly resonant pieces by Mark Turner and Dan Hassler-Forest which are not to be missed on any account. Overall, this book is that rare thing: a thematic study that broadens rather than narrows the focus of media scrutiny.

Mark Turner’s ambitious opening chapter reads like a manifesto and sounds the note of many of the pieces to follow. It is an argument for the “unruliness” of serials and the necessity of grappling with the problem of scale. Warning against the pursuit of the chimera of completeness, both in individual research and in the cultural project of the digitization of historic serials, he examines four trends in current serials scholarship, familiar to all practitioners, which are predicated on just such a model of serial coherence and discernible wholes. In an inspired move, he probes the paths of adverts on one page of the Publishers’ Circular of July 1841 to illustrate the “sprawling content” of the nineteenth-century press, deriving four alternatives to our current methods that take account of the “non-uniformity” of serials (20). Another set of four key characteristics of serials that sits provocatively beside Turner’s is proposed by Sean O’Sullivan, writing on two films by Bergman and their prehistory as television series. In a study of encyclopedias from the medieval period to the present, Erinc Salor considers the shift from the concept of a stable body of complete knowledge to the evanescent Wikipedia model of evolving refinement and correction.

A number of other contributors, writing on various forms of media, pursue the idea of “disruption” in serials, which they posit is just as definitive of seriality as continuity is commonly taken to be. Thus, Rob Allen examines disruption and the Victorian serial novel, and Maria Damkjael juxtaposes time in the serial form (1859–61) of Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management with a distinct, disruptive, and iterative “domestic time” within the text itself (47). “Time is made by the material circumstances of serial publication,” she concludes (47). This is an interesting piece about serial and domestic time, as well as about the genre of the cookbook, itself a serial production consisting of others’ recipes collected through a process akin to scrapbooking, issued first in parts, then in a manual/book format, followed by a series of augmented editions.

Others likewise treat gender, disruption, and serialisation. Shane...