The final publication of the Popular Seriality – Aesthetics and Practice network, an effective conclusion and précis of the research unit’s work over the last six years.
Frank Kelleter’s opening chapter ‘Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality’, lays out the broad theoretical and methodological construction of seriality, with which he opened the Berlin conference; and which he, Ruth Mayer and Kathleen Loock, Scott Higgins (in a revised version of his keynote from the Paris conference), Shane Denson (in a combined version of his papers from the New York and Berlin conferences), Jason Mittell, and Christine Meyer amongst others go on to utilise and demonstrate across the books 14 chapters.
“Media of Serial Narrative is a strong collection that adds significantly to our understanding of seriality across media. As a whole, the volume both ranges widely across media and time and also tightly coheres around the history of seriality. I believe Media of Serial Narrative will have real impact in the fields of film, television, literature, comics, and games where there is interest in seriality, and I highly recommend it.” –Greg Smith, author of Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal and Film Structure and the Emotion System
Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, is the first book-length study to address the increasingly popular topic of serial narratives—specifically, how practices and forms of seriality shape media throughout the landscape of popular culture. In modern entertainment formats, seriality and popularity can seem so obviously connected that scholarship has long neglected to address their specific interrelations. This volume looks closely at the relationship between seriality, popularity, media, and narrative form and asks: What are the structural conditions of serial stories? Which historical circumstances are presupposed or supported by series and serials? How do commercial types of seriality differ from serial structures in other cultural fields?
Media of Serial Narrative focuses on key sites and technologies of popular seriality since the mid-nineteenth century and up to today: newspapers, comics, cinema, television, and digital communication. Paying close attention to the affordances of individual media, as well as to their historical interactions, the fourteen chapters survey the forms, processes, and functions of popular serial storytelling. With individual chapters by Frank Kelleter, Jared Gardner, Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, Scott Higgins, Shane Denson, Ruth Mayer, Kathleen Loock, Constantine Verevis, Jason Mittell, Sudeep Dasgupta, Sean O’Sullivan, Henry Jenkins, Christine Hämmerling, Mirjam Nast, and Andreas Sudmann, Media of Serial Narrative is an exciting and broad-ranging intervention in the fields of seriality, media, and narrative studies.
To be Continued… Serials, series & sequential media 