The Periodical Text Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of “Literature” in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Textual serialization was a pervasive practice in the United States in the nineteenth century but also—as the century came to an end—an increasingly contentious one, with emergent academic-disciplinary conceptions of literature starting to define the field in terms of notions of textual integrity antithetical to the part-publication techniques of mass periodical culture. Expanding on emergent media studies–influenced approaches to serialization and their debt to Latourian theories of culture as network in particular, this essay seeks to understand the development of modern intellectual specialization by considering the nineteenth-century magazine as a complex web of different modes of writing whose engagements with and adaptations of each other both resisted and were resisted by the process of disciplinary differentiation that Niklas Luhmann sees as integral to contemporary societies. Taking a particular issue of the quality magazine the Atlantic Monthly from 1872 as its case study, this essay comprehensively maps the intersection between different serialized genres during the nineteenth century, in the process pushing accounts of serialization beyond the dominant emphasis on the novel to consider serialized biographies, essays, poems, and short stories while also delineating the shifting cultural prestige of these literary forms.