Although seriality is arguably a feature of virtually all cultural productions, perhaps most especially literary productions, seriality as a distinctive principle of cultural production remains underexamined. One letter follows another, one word leads to the next, sentences pile upon sentences, paragraphs accumulate while chapters and parts and volumes succeed one another and books eventually line up on shelves. Plots feature event after event. Poems string lines and stanzas and cantos together. Plays feature speech upon speech, scene after scene, numbered acts, Henry VI Parts I, II, and III. Comics and graphic novels often feature panel after panel—or they depart from that traditional format while relying upon it as the serial convention they are messing with. Seriality has perhaps been most fully studied in one particular domain of the cultural field: periodical publication of nineteenth-century serialized fiction (especially British Victorian). But other forms of serial composition and production have received less scholarly attention, and even serialized fiction, the study of which has been vastly aided by the proliferation of digital archives, has not always reckoned with digitalization as itself a new form of serialization. This session seeks to expand and refine our understanding of serial compositional practices, material forms, and reception scenarios through a comparative analysis of three kinds of serial forms (sonnet sequence, digitalized serial fiction, postcards) originating in different times and places (early modern England, Victorian Britain/digital modernity, twentieth-century United States) and exhibiting different serial characteristics in their moments of composition, reception, and remediation. Recently there have been several special issues of journals, and forums and clusters, on seriality, most recently the “Cluster of Essays on Serial Narrative” in Narrative 27.1 (Jan. 2019), featuring contributions from Sean O’Sullivan, Kathryn VanArendonk, Tore Rye Andersen and Sara Tanderup Linkis, Lauren M. E. Goodlad, and others. Another recent example would be the “New Perspectives on Seriality” forum in The Velvet Light Trap 79 (2017), with contributions from Richard Abel, Jennifer M. Bean, Scott Higgins, Frank Kelleter, Elana Levine, Daisuke Miyao, Roberta Pearson, and Babette B. Tischleder. We would also mention the companion special issues on periodical studies and the aesthetics of serial form of ESC: English Studies in Canada 41.1 (March 2015) and the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 6.2 (2015), both co-ed. Faye Hammill, Paul Hjartson, and Hannah McGregor. As these examples suggest, the dominant paradigms in the field of seriality studies have hitherto tended to originate in the study of narrative fiction and print periodicals or in the field of modern media studies (film, television, comics). This proposed session aims to shift the primary ground in new historical and medial directions as well as enrich and complicate the methodologies and theories guiding research into seriality.

First, Lucía Martínez Valdivia investigates the paradoxical notion of a sonnet sequence—a lyric narrative—in this case, exploring seriality as an alternative organizing principle in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and its inheritor collections. Rather than a sequence or a cycle, the idea of a sonnet series or, more precisely, of serial sonnets captures (Valdivia argues) the phenomenology of reading early modern sonnet collections, of the reader’s awareness of both the individual poetic unit and its repetition, and of their own gradual, recursive progress through the larger series. Her paper argues that lyric movement through time occurs in present-tense parcels both disjointed and unified by the serial reiteration of ideas through small, self-contained forms.

Second, Madeline B. Gangnes explore the digitalization of Victorian serialized fiction, acknowledging the rapid expansion of scholarship on Victorian periodicals afforded by online digital archives but analyzing the limitations of digitalization too. Gangnes stipulates that even as periodical scholars laud digital facsimiles, they must acknowledge their limitations. Availability does not necessarily lead to accessibility; cumbersome interfaces, poor file quality and OCR, limited search criteria, insufficient metadata, and paywalls can mean that though a facsimile resides on the Internet, it might be difficult or impossible to use. These issues are compounded for scholars and students for whom visual texts present challenges. To remedy such issues, Gangnes has created a public-facing online project that exemplifies ways in which historical and material contexts of serialized texts—in this case, The War of the Worlds—might be made more approachable and accessible.

Third, Gabrielle N. O. Dean investigates postcard seriality—the modern postcard serial and the several different kinds of seriality involved in postcard production and collecting. Over 25 years ago, Naomi Schor claimed that these ultimate souvenirs “[fail] to produce memories”—at least in collections. This “mnemonic sterility” Schor blames on their seriality. Dean pushes back on Schor’s claim by unpacking several different modes of postcard “collectioneering”: personal serialization; near duplicate postcards; and real photo postcards—commercially printed cards made from amateur photographs—with particular attention to the real photo postcards of Gertrude Stein. These examples suggest that, in practice, collectors could wrest from the concept of seriality something more satisfying than mere sequence and its implied, and perhaps illusory, teleology. The pleasures of seriality, she discovers, include endlessness, multiplicity, and potential repetition—all of which do require memory, and indeed invoke it.

In bringing together discussions of various forms of serial composition this special session aims to broaden and deepen our understanding of serial composition as such, take stock of its near permeation of modern cultural production, and tease out its distinctive principles.