Serial Forms

Abstract Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 proposes an entirely new way of reading the transition into the modern. The first book in a three-part series which will take the reader up to the end of the First World War, Serial Forms looks at the rapid expansion of print in London after the Napoleonic Wars. It shows how the historical past and the contemporary moment are emerging into public visibility through serial newsprint, illustrations, performances, shows, and new forms of mediation and it suggests that the growing importance and determining power of the form of seriality is a result of the parallel and connected development of a news culture alongside an emergent popular culture of historicism. Pettitt’s attention to the increasingly powerful cultural work of seriality in this period offers a fresh new way of thinking about print, media, literary and art history, as well as political, historical and social categories. The argument of Serial Forms rests on historical and archival material but the book also offers a philosophical and theoretical account of the impact of seriality. This first volume sets out the theoretical and historical basis for the subsequent two volumes in the series, which move out of London to encompass continental Europe and the imagination of the global. Serial Forms proposes fresh and frame-shifting analyses of familiar texts and authors, such as Scott, Byron and Gaskell, and sets out to change our thinking about new experiences of time and place in the first half of the nineteenth century.