Novels on the installment plan: American authorship in the age of serial publication, from Stowe to Hemingway.
Item
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Title
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Novels on the installment plan: American authorship in the age of serial publication, from Stowe to Hemingway.
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Identifier
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AAI3288842
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identifier
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3288842
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Creator
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Ihara, Rachel.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Marc Dolan
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American
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Abstract
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While there are shelves of academic books devoted to American novels and American novelists, the role of serial publication in literary history of the United States has received slight critical attention. Often, the details of original publication simply go unmarked, reinforcing the myth that novels emerge all at once, fully formed and whole, and neglecting the fact that, for much of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth, American novelists relied upon a publishing system whereby their work appeared in pieces in periodicals over time. Moreover, when scholars make note of a novel's initial serialization, they tend to overstate or understate its effects, assuming either that novelists are corrupted by serialization, resulting in choppy and sensational novels that pander to readers' basest instincts, or that this practice is merely incidental and therefore irrelevant to our understanding of the novelist's craft. Between these two extremes, this dissertation posits, is a third perspective, whereby serialization is understood to be an integral part of the material conditions of authorship, an important publishing phenomenon with which all would-be novelists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had to contend.;This is not to say that all experiences with serialization are the same; in fact, individual authors responded to the exigencies of serial publication in distinct and idiosyncratic ways. Nonetheless, authors from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Ernest Hemingway invariably came to see their novels in relation to this mode of publication. Novelists as disparate as Henry James, Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote during a period when serialization was essential to professional success. Their negotiations with serial publication, the subject of this dissertation, are evident in both their explicit comments on serial authorship and in the novels themselves, which engage the formal and theoretical implications of the installment novel in interesting ways. An appreciation of individual efforts to write within such a publication marketplace thus reveals the extent to which ideas about authorship and novel writing developed out of a larger context of periodical publication and the various ways that serialization in American magazines has shaped American authorial identity.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
