Serial (literature)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Developed by John Neal and others over the 1820s and 1830s, short stories and serials in magazines began to be popular by the mid-19th century. Some of them were more respectable, while others were referred to by the derogatory name of penny dreadfuls. In 1844 Alexandre Dumas, père published a novel The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) and wrote The Count of Monte Cristo which was published in installments over the next two years. William Makepeace Thackeray published The Luck of Barry Lyndon. In Britain Charles Dickens published several of his books in installments in magazines: The Pickwick Papers, followed, in the next few years, by Oliver Twist (1837–1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). In America a version of the penny dreadful became popularly known as a dime novel. In the dime novels the reputations of gunfighters and other wild west heroes or villains were created or exaggerated. The western genre came into existence. James Fenimore Cooper began a series of stories featuring the characters Hawkeye and Chingachgook. These stories were not only "westerns" but also historical novels, the earliest setting being approximately 100 years earlier than the year James Fenimore Cooper was writing it. The series was called the Leatherstocking Tales and comprised five volumes: The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823), The Prairie (1827)."--Sholem Stein |
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The term "serial" refers to the intrinsic property of a series — namely, its order. In literature, the term is used as a noun to refer to a format (within a genre) by which a story is told in contiguous (typically chronological) installments in sequential issues of a single periodical publication.
History
The idea of stories being told in serial form dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), which consisted of a series of serialized stories, or "serialized novels" or novellas. Its frame story is about Sheherazade telling stories to King Shahriyar, and she needs to keep him interested in each of the stories, in order to prevent him from executing her the next morning.
In the 19th century, many writers earned a living by writing stories in serial form for popular magazines.
Many of Charles Dickens' novels, for example, were originally published in this manner, and that is the reason that many are so long — the more chapters Dickens wrote, the longer the serial continued in the magazine and the more money he was paid.
Other famous writers who wrote serial literature for popular magazines included Wilkie Collins, inventor of the English detective novel and author of The Moonstone; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the Sherlock Holmes stories originally for serialization in The Strand magazine; and the Polish writer Boleslaw Prus, author of the serialized novels The Outpost (1885-86), The Doll (1887-89), The New Woman (1890-93) and his sole historical novel, Pharaoh (the latter, exceptionally, written entire over a year's time in 1894-95 and serialized only after completion, in 1895-96).
Stephen King wrote his novel The Green Mile as a serial.
More recently, writers have been encouraged by the easy accessibility of the Internet to return to the serial format. Stephen King experimented with this format with The Plant (2000), and Michel Faber allowed The Guardian to serialise his novel, The Crimson Petal and the White.
Online serials have been used to create fictional communities, as in Presence, or to reinterpret and comment on actually existing communities, as in Sydney Shards.
See also
