Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation by Thomas Vranken (review)

Periodical studies have long sought to intervene in the formal practices of traditional literary studies. Its aims have been to go beyond close readings of a literary text to also consider its social context, the materiality of the medium in which it appears, and the surrounding paratext on and across the page. Extensive attention has also been given to analyzing the patterns and rhythm of magazine publication across space and time, in other words, serialization. A ground-breaking book on the topic was The Victorian Serial (University of Virginia Press, 1991) in which Linda Hughes and Michael Lund argued that serialization was intrinsic to Victorian society, reinforcing its "capitalist culture … conceptions of time … and gradualist tendencies" (4–7). More recently, Catherine Delafield in Serialization and the Novel in Mid-Victorian Magazines (Routledge, 2015), Caroline Levine in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015), Bethany Wood in Women Adapting: Bringing Three Serials of the Roaring Twenties to Stage and Screen (University of Iowa Press, 2019), and Frank Kelleter in Media of Serial Narrative (The Ohio State University Press, 2017) have highlighted the ways in which serial texts encourage audience interaction, self-reflexively adapt and evolve, and often proliferate "beyond the bounds of their own media" (Kelleter 2).

In Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialization, Thomas Vranken takes up the complexities of serialization with analytical rigor and gusto, with a focus on American and British literature in the late Victorian era. As he writes—and I wholeheartedly agree—this period continues to be overlooked as merely a precursor to modernist experimentation to come. The era, as Vranken shows, was in fact "obsessed with novelty … in magazines (as in so many other aspects of Anglo-American society) … a period of efflorescence, in which high literary authors were still able to engage a wide public audience" (80).

His book is divided into three parts, focusing on the serial publication—or rather serial "experiments"—of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Return of Sherlock Holmes, respectively. Key to Vranken's interest in these works is that as the nineteenth century came to an end, editors of British and American magazines lost zeal for the traditional serialization of novels and began to experiment with less conventional magazine formats. In the case of Twain, the Century Illustrated Magazine opted to publish excerpts from the forthcoming book in non-linear, fragmented fashion, somewhat akin to modern-day teasers, between 1884 and 1885. In the case of Wilde, Lippincott's broke with tradition entirely by choosing to publish his full novel in a single issue in July 1890. As Vranken has it, the simple fact of being a one-off publication tied in neatly with the anti-aging theme of the novel—for with the perennially young Dorian, there is no true progression or evolving chapters. In the case of Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes was published as a discontinuous short story series simultaneously in the British Strand and the American Collier's Weekly (1903–1905), each version offering a unique reading experience for a particular audience. The implications of these varied publication histories and experimental forms are deftly examined by Vranken, who also makes key connections to pertinent historical and material contexts.

As Vranken notes, the three pre-publication excerpts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that appeared in the Century do not provide a fully satisfying readerly experience. Instead, they seemed "designed to encourage the reader to buy Twain's forthcoming book—like analogue precursors to the 'Preview' and 'Look Inside' functions found on Google Books and Amazon.com" (7). I, too, have long wondered about the curious nature of these excerpts, which are almost useless for teaching in a literature class by themselves. Rather than narratively continuous, the plots—both across the excerpts and within them—jump about. Vranken finds this narrative discontinuity...