Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. It is the first book in a series of three which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, moving from a focus on London to a global perspective.
Serial Forms sets out the theoretical and historical basis for all three volumes. It suggests that, as a serial news culture and a stadial historicism developed together between 1815 and 1848, seriality became the dominant form of the nineteenth century. Through serial newsprint, illustrations,
performances, and shows, the past and the contemporary moment enter into public visibility together. Serial Forms argues that it is through seriality that the social is represented as increasingly politically urgent. The insistent rhythm of the serial reorganizes time, recalibrates and rescales the
social, and will prepare the way for the 1848 revolutions which are the subject of the next book. By placing their work back into the messy print and performance culture from which it originally appeared, Serial Forms is able to produce new and exciting readings of familiar authors such as Scott,
Byron, Dickens, and Gaskell. Rather than offering a rarefied intellectual history or chopping up the period into 'Romantic' and 'Victorian', Clare Pettitt tracks the development of communications technologies and their impact on the ways in which time, history and virtuality are imagined.
Author(s): Clare Pettitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 368
City: Oxford
Cover
Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Serial Forms
Why 1815–1848?
Why London?
News, History, Shows
Mediality and Materiality
Seriality: Reformatting the Future
After 1848
The Argument of Serial Forms
Chapter 1: Yesterday’s News
Borrowing the News
Weekly Rhythms: Sunday Papers and Twopenny Papers
‘Straggling Papers’: Broadsides, Ballads and Chapbooks
Yearly Rhythms: Almanacs
Chapter 2: Scott Unbound
Ballads, Broadsides, and Miscellanies
Serializing the Miscellany
Scrapbooks and Albums
Mediation and News: The Antiquary
Citizenship and Shared Reading
Chapter 3: Live Byron
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the Moving Panorama of the Past
News and the Scandal of the Topical
‘A Storm and Shipwreck’: The Shows of London
Scalar Effects
Seriality and Survival
Live Performance and Bodily Authenticity
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Vesuvius on the Strand
Vesuvius as a Serial Event
Fizzing and Roaring: Revolutionary Noise
Revolutionary Seriality
Bulwer’s Vesuvius Show: The Last Days of Pompeii
Dailiness and the Event
Chapter 5: Scalar: Pugin, Carlyle, Dickens
Historicism in the Early Nineteenth Century
‘Real-Phantasmagory’: Mediation and the Past
Scale in Pugin and Carlyle
London Streets: Advertising and Scale
Social Seriality and Sketches by Boz
Conclusion
Chapter 6: History in Miniature
Seriality and Miscellanity: The Mirror and the Twopenny Magazines
Woodcuts and the ‘Active Power of Images’
Image—Object—Event: Serializing the Ancient Past in the Mirror and the Penny Magazine
Historical Objects as Events
Touching the Past: Toys and Games
Conclusion: The Scale of History
Chapter 7: Biopolitics of Seriality
‘Generation’ and ‘Life’
Chronobiopolitics: Family Time, Calendars and Seriality
Interruptible Gaskell
Biocitizenship, Race and Howitt’s Journal
1848 and Revolution: Conclusion
Conclusion: 1848 and Serial Revolutions
Bibliography
Index
