The Periodical Text Network, Serialized Genres, and the Making of “Literature” in the Nineteenth-Century United States

This article intervenes into current debates around genre and textual production in nineteenth-century American periodical culture by expanding our understanding of magazine serialization beyond its typical focus on fiction. Drawing on various theories that media studies scholars have formulated about the practice of serialization in late twentieth-century popular culture, this article outlines how the nineteenth-century magazine can be conceived of as a Luhmannian/Latourian network of interrelated and interacting texts that defined themselves against each other in a process of ongoing self-reflection. Jumping off from a specific issue of the influential ‘quality magazine’ Atlantic Monthly from 1872, I examine how the constellation of a serialized novel, short story, biography, essay, and poem in the pages of this issue can be contextualized in relation to the longer history of the emergence of these genres in serial form and in relation to the intensifying doubts over the aesthetic validity of serialization that peaked at the turn of the twentieth century. Positioning literary criticism as an additional genre that was increasingly attempting to assert its dominance within the periodical text-network, I argue that modern disciplinary conceptions of ‘literature’ evolved from and through the negotiations between different narrative forms being explored in this article