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Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation by Thomas Vranken

2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vpr.2020.0037

1712-526X

Meaghan Scott,

Publishing and Scholarly Communication

Reviewed by: Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation by Thomas Vranken Meaghan Scott (bio) Thomas Vranken, Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. xvi + 150, $155 hardcover. In Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation, Thomas Vranken broadens current periodicals scholarship by analyzing three experiments undertaken by literary magazines at the end of the nineteenth century, when serialization was no longer attractive to Victorian audiences. Vranken claims that modern-day scholars think of serialization as the default form when considering the nineteenth-century publishing industry. He further argues that we immediately associate that publishing tradition with "high-Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens manically racing to produce material to a relentlessly-regular deadline" (1). While Vranken values past scholarship on serialization, he illustrates important shifts in later nineteenth-century magazines' publication methods and contends that we must expand our focus to better understand those decisions in their historical contexts. Vranken establishes the publishing industry's growing resistance to and ultimate rejection of serialization, and he conscientiously explores publishers' decisions to experiment with a variety of publication practices intended to refresh readers' interest in magazines. Beginning with the increased demand for "instant gratification" in the late nineteenth century, he describes Victorian readers' deeper satisfaction in reading an entire literary work quickly in one sitting rather than over a longer period of time (5). Building in part on the work of Walter Dill Scott, an early twentieth-century American psychologist, Vranken argues that evidence of Victorians' "ideological investment in contextual hermeneutics" can "amplify a number of previously-muted voices in order to strengthen and enhance our understanding of the era" (6). Scott's 1902 article on the concept of fusion within advertising psychology, included in the book's appendix, seeks to explicate readers' experience of the advertisements surrounding literary texts in periodicals and its impact on their economic choices. To "give as complete a picture of that environment as possible," Vranken devotes chapters to three distinct experiments by the publication industry: publishing full novels in a single issue of a periodical, publishing excerpts of novels before their complete debut in a magazine, and publishing series of discontinuous [End Page 453] short stories (7). Drawing on Scott's study, Vranken investigates the relationship between Victorian readers and the periodical content surrounding literary texts, including articles, editorials, and advertisements. Vranken contends that an underlying theme of serialization, "slow and steady, Christian, gradualism," was an undercurrent of mid-Victorian society's need for reassurance "that an author hovers above their life too: a truly omniscient figure, calmly unfolding the significance of otherwise-isolated events at the properly appointed intervals" (10). Just thirty years later, society had "fragmented into chaotic 'metropolitan individuality,'" dictating the need for publishers to attempt divergent publishing strategies (10). The first chapter explores how Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was excerpted in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine before being published as a complete novel in 1885. Each of these extracts, Vranken asserts, "retained a semi-distinct identity of its own" (14). The "remarkably chaotic, even indecisive" quality of Huckleberry Finn "seemed to defy those temporal, textual, and geographic constraints that typically flow from standard publication," and it reflects the era's preoccupation with pushing traditional boundaries (13). Indeed, Vranken points out, "The Century (in other ways the most conventional of those magazines examined in this study) felt it had no choice but to push at the outer boundaries of periodical publication" (15). Chapter two focuses on Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, which was published in a single issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1891. Lippincott's decision to adjust its publication methods resulted not only in stronger satisfaction for readers but also a deeper freedom from authorial "constraints normally attendant upon traditional magazine publication" since authors only needed to submit to one round with an editorial board (33). Vranken further explores the risks involved with this approach: the lack of audience feedback that accompanied serial publication and readers' lessening trust in periodicals due to advertisements. The Picture of Dorian Gray was published surrounded by advertisements for pseudoscientific remedies such as anti-aging treatments, which Vranken analyzes alongside Wilde's novel. Drawing on Scott...