Chapter 15 - Seriality

Summary

This essay charts the rise of serial fiction from sensational to sentimental series. Many of these texts were written by authors who were once well known but who are now largely forgotten. Or scholars may be familiar with one or two titles from these writers’ whole corpus, as may be the case for E. D. E. N. Southworth’s fifty-two novels. Publishers such as Peterson’s and Street & Smith profited from these novels, as did the authors who engaged their readers with popular, if sometimes convoluted, plots. Drawing these readers to serials was the reliability of their narrative repetitions and excitement of their psychological dramas over how to deal with transitions in US culture.