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

In a seminar I teach on seriality and small forms, students usually begin the course a bit perplexed by seriality as a concept, but, by the end of the semester, they commonly report back that they can’t help but see seriality everywhere they look. In our age of so-called peak TV, cascading sequels and prequels in the Marvel and DC universes, and the never-ending stream of social media feeds, it is certainly not hard to find oneself inundated by chunks of culture that are decidedly serial in structure and presentation. From a scholarly perspective, viewing cultural objects as parts in a series is a particular choice, one step in a methodological process: as the theorist of popular seriality Frank Kelleter has noted, “One and the same text can be regarded as simultaneously serial and non-serial, depending on the perspective from which it is seen.” Clare Pettitt is clear about where she stands on this choice: in her monograph Serial Forms she programmatically treats texts, images, artifacts, and performances as elements of various different sorts of multimedia series, and she calls for an understanding of seriality as the defining form of modernity. The methodological stakes for such a call are high, not least because much of the history of literary and cultural criticism has opted to look at a limited number of novels, poems, or plays by certain privileged authors as singular, self-standing works. Pettitt’s incisive monograph sets a new bar for studies of serial forms and their effects in shaping the cultural, social, and political imagination.It is quite in keeping with her topic that Pettitt has tasked herself with not one but three books on the history of modern seriality from the early nineteenth century up to the end of the First World War, and Serial Forms is the first, focusing on the period between 1815 and 1848. Locating the advent of familiarly modern modes of seriality in the nineteenth century is certainly a recognizable move to literary and cultural historians working in the fields of periodical studies and book and print history; indeed, critics commonly point to nineteenth-century serialized fiction when contextualizing the current boom in serial TV. Pettitt’s book builds on scholarship on nineteenth-century literary seriality, but she also advocates for expanding our focus beyond prose fiction published in installments, treating seriality not merely as a literary category, but also as a political, historical, and social phenomenon. This is a welcome approach that allows her to address news reporting and visual culture, historicism and public performance, new understandings of biological life and citizenship, and more, showing the significance of serial forms for a wide range of different elements of society. In particular, Pettitt argues that serial forms reorganize the awareness of time and of social life. As she puts it, serial media function as “technologies of capture,” selecting out and circumscribing certain noteworthy occurrences or historical events and presenting them to readers or viewers, while at the same time also situating such representations in an ongoing flow of varied objects. Serial forms scale different phenomena up and down, they compress the monumental and dilate out the momentary, and they employ repetition and variation to shape experience and orient readers and viewers to the future. Pettitt studies the implications of such technologies of capture, compression, and scaling for the perception of historical time, natural time, and the time of society.In this first book, Pettitt sets her sights on early and mid-nineteenth-century London, promising a more expansive, global scope in subsequent monographs on the 1848 revolutions and on seriality as a technology of empire. In 1815, London was the fastest growing city in the world, and the serial forms developed there are decidedly urban in nature. This monograph thus functions as something of an extended case study, with other urban centers—Paris, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Saint Louis—presumably lending themselves well to similar kinds of explorations. Pettitt’s focus on the first half of the century is welcome, for, as she argues, this period lays the groundwork for the importance of seriality in an era prior to the mass society and mass communication of the second half of the long nineteenth century, an era that she implies obscures certain emancipatory tendencies of the early century. Her approach complements other recent scholarship that helps rethink the early and mid-nineteenth century at the intersection of media, institutional, and cultural history, such as work by Angela Esterhammer or Jon Klancher. She surveys a range of important figures in the literary and publishing scene such as Scott, Carlyle, Byron, Dickens, and the Howitts, inserting their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it emerged, thereby providing welcome alternatives to more traditional scholarly treatment of such figures.Pettitt’s explorations of the material practices associated with serial form are particularly illuminating. The first chapter describes shifting news cultures and the development of modern reporting as it emerged from the miscellaneous print of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here she compares the divergent media times of earlier broadsides to that of more modern serialized print formats: the former feature single, end-stopped events, while the latter promise readers with ever more chunks of information, more reports, more images, more events. Gift annuals, with their various kinds of imagery and their function as Christmas and New Year’s presents, likewise serve to mark time in different ways, involving readers in particular, time-specific material practices. As she argues, print functions as a central “medium in a multimedia virtual London that was growing in scale and complexity alongside the built city” (24). Chapter 2 considers how material serial forms are manifested by the writings of Walter Scott. Seeking to displace Scott from standard narratives of the rise of the novel, Pettitt proposes to “unbind” his writings by uncovering their proximity to the various miscellaneous albums, scrapbooks, and show displays that he employed and drew inspiration from. As she shows, Scott’s writings adapt the propensity of these miscellaneous forms to shape the attention of readers and viewers in different ways. The Scott chapter is a great example of how keen attention to serial form can reorient scholarship on certain canonical writers.Chapters 3 and 4 set their sights on cultures of performance and spectacle. Pettitt proposes we regard panoramas and popular shows as both live events and intermedial performances, and she thereby takes up scholarly debates about liveness and virtuality. Such spectacles catalyze popular fascinations, they draw on ongoing debates in the press, and they help to make news events legible as part of a historical series, and they thus shape an emergent sense of historical time. Pettitt explores these topics through an extended contextualizing reading of the serial performances of shipwrecks in Byron’s Don Juan and Géricault’s oil painting The Raft of the Medusa. Chapter 4 looks at the eruption of Mount Vesuvius as a serial event that captured the imagination of contemporaries across classes. Here she tracks the proliferation of eruptions across multiple genres and formats ranging from literary works, as in Bulwer’s 1834 hit The Last Days of Pompeii, to opera and panoramas. Both chapters make a case for considering a broad range of serialized representations of different catastrophic events in tandem with one another. This kind of reading places such representations into a broader context of cross-class readership and cultural participation and helps to rethink conventional literary and generic hierarchies.Chapters 5 and 6 both examine the role of serial forms in producing scaling effects that make the old and the contemporary visible in new ways. Chapter 5 looks at writings by Pugin, Carlyle, and Dickens that provide different perspectives on what it means to be modern in the late 1830s and early 1840s. As Pettitt argues, all three writers take recourse to modern media across diverse publicational projects in order to superimpose past and present. Pettitt’s treatment of Dickens’s Sketches of Boz is particularly informative. In dialogue with Sartre and Benedict Anderson, Pettitt argues that Dicken’s serialized sketches enable the imagining of certain new modes of collective existence and of social types and thereby shapes conceptions of modern citizenship. These passages are a good example of how Pettitt engages with a range of broader theoretical debates and sheds new light on the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, Crary, Lefebvre, Badiou, and more through the lens of seriality. The book’s final, seventh chapter does this as well, engaging with the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics when treating views of biological life and reproduction in the radical weekly magazine Howitt’s Journal.Chapter 6 turns to historicizing print artifacts, asking readers to understand historicism as a kind of material practice. Pettitt looks at how classicizing images in almanacs and other serial media shape historical awareness, suggesting that we understand images of locations and events from different historical periods as the “equipment” of historicism and of popular history writing in the period. Here and throughout the book, Pettitt places particular importance on how serial forms serve to scale and measure time, but also to help people situate themselves in the present; it is in part the serialized representations of the past that allow for a sense of the present to emerge. This chapter offers interesting material that would be well suited to being placed in dialogue with similar phenomena in other national traditions as well as with the scholarship on these topics, and I look forward to seeing what Pettitt will do with the transnational moment of 1848 and with colonialism in subsequent books. It is hard to ask a book that engages with such a wide range of theoretical interlocutors to engage with even more scholarship in other linguistic and cultural areas, but Pettitt seems to have chosen largely to seek synergy with comparatist scholarship primarily via important, widely received theoretical figures rather than with the secondary literature in German and French nineteenth-century studies, say, where seriality has been a topic of interest of late. I am curious to see how Pettitt’s remaining two books will move from London to other sites around Europe and the globe and how she will navigate the comparatist scholarship on these later periods. Due not least to the daunting size of print corpora, periodical- and media-historical approaches to the nineteenth-century print landscape have often remained focused on specific national literary contexts. Pettitt’s thorough and multifaceted theoretization of serial forms gives comparatist scholarship plenty of tools to bridge these different contexts.The subtitle of Serial Forms includes The Unfinished Project of Modernity, riffing on Habermas’s 1980 lecture of a similar title. Serial forms are quintessentially unfinished because they inherently point beyond themselves to the next installment, orienting readers to the future, to what is to come. Additionally, as Pettitt suggests, their various states of unfinishedness also point to the possibility that the serial cultures of the early nineteenth century, which brought ordinary people into emergent popular cultures and created new forms of social visibility, might serve as harbingers of a more emancipatory future in the wake of the failed promises of modernism and twentieth-century democracy. Unfinishedness is also undoubtably an enticing feature of Pettitt’s larger project (until her remaining two monographs are in print, at least), with Serial Forms leaving readers eagerly anticipating the next installments in her expansive and compelling history of serial form.