Transmedia Practices in the Long Nineteenth Century by Christina Meyer Monika Pietrzak-Franger

Author:Christina Meyer, Monika Pietrzak-Franger [Christina Meyer, Monika Pietrzak-Franger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000542868
Goodreads: 59140692
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

Crossroads of fact and fiction

6

Transmedia practices toward a popular cultural sphere

Lippard, Thompson, and nineteenth-century serialities

Lisanna Wiele

DOI: 10.4324/9781003222941-8

Introduction

Perhaps no genre in the nineteenth century encapsulates the defining processes of serialization, adaptation, and appropriation of the period as forcefully as the antebellum city mystery novel, which began with the French roman-feuilleton and quickly became an “international vogue” (Sollors 104) in the 1840s and 50s. Alongside the evolution of a globally expanding network of print media and communications, a “culture of dense, enmeshed seriality” (Turner 197) emerged. And while serial narratives became, as Franco Moretti has pointed out “the true protagonist of cultural life” (150), so did their transmedia circulations, creating a horizontal permeation of the cultural sphere within a budding “era of collective intelligence” (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101”). The sudden and ever-increasing flood of information offered through the dense seriality of antebellum print culture was marked by an ongoing “tension between abundance and limitation” and, consequently, an “excess of material, a spilling over the edges” (Turner 209).

This process of slopping over, this “excess of material” could not be accommodated by print alone, but rather triggered various, often-chaotic, transmedia practices, expanding narratives from their original source. Utilizing the idea of a transmedia archaeology (Scolari et al.) and viewing transmedia storytelling, as scholars have,1 as a (loose) network of texts or narratives, expanding a fictional universe in various media, this chapter traces the channels and media of proliferation of a popular, bestselling genre beyond the printed page. Centering on the transmedia practices that played a key role in the transnational popularization of the city mystery novel, I aim to show that the genre succeeded, if not necessarily as systematically as Henry Jenkins suggests, in the dispersion of “integral elements of a fiction” that created a ‘unified’ (entertainment) experience and provided innovative contributions to the “unfolding of the story” (Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101”), as well as to its opportunities for public reception. The iterations and re-iterations of the city mysteries in and across different media are representative of the nineteenth-century mediascape and in fact reminiscent of the dynamics described by Christina Meyer and Monika Pietrzak-Franger in their introduction to this volume – the expansion of storyworlds (or tropes, concepts, or iconic character traits from a narrative) via illustrations, the theater, politically charged campaigns and merchandise surrounding the texts.

This chapter utilizes, primarily, George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1845) as well as Ned Buntline’s Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1849) as case studies to examine the practices and processes transforming the city mysteries from serial pamphlet to book-bound novel and then to the stage, spilling over each medium into public political discourse and transnational movements such as the abolition of slavery. I argue that the initial serial character of the city mysteries in the periodical press triggered a development that was able to accommodate the ‘spill’ of the texts’ potentially explosive political agenda, which targeted social inequality in urban centers and harshly critiqued the exploitation of the lower classes by the upper ten thousand.

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