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This book investigates the 'series' in children's literature. The works of several well-known children's authors - UK and the US, traditional and contemporary - are analyzed, and using these examples, the book explores the special nature and appeal of series writing for children. As well as providing an historical overview of the series, the author raises important questions about the nature of literary criticism applied to children's literature.

Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture examines the ways in which young female heroines in American series fiction have undergone dramatic changes in the past 150 years, changes which have both reflected and modeled standards of behavior for America's tweens and teen girls. Though series books are often derided for lacking in imagination and literary potency, that the majority of American girls have been exposed to girls' series in some form, whether through books, television, or other media, suggests that this genre needs to be studied further and that the development of the heroines that girls read about have created an impact that is worthy of a fresh critical lens. Thus, this collection explores how series books have influenced and shaped popular American culture and, in doing so, girls' everyday experiences from the mid nineteenth century until now. The collection interrogates the cultural work that is performed through the series genre, contemplating the messages these books relay about subjects including race, class, gender, education, family, romance, and friendship, and it examines the trajectory of girl fiction within such contexts as material culture, geopolitics, socioeconomics, and feminism.

\"A valuable and comprehensive survey of an enormous subject.\"--Paul Goldman, author ofReading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room \"A marvelous overview of how and why illustrations became an integral part of Victorian fiction. Golden documents a remarkable continuity from early nineteenth-century caricatures to realistic portrait-based illustrations to current graphic rewritings of familiar classics.\"--Martha Vicinus, author ofIntimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 \"A capacious and synthetic work that draws on a wide variety of scholarship, a very impressive command of the history of book illustration, a huge array of visual and verbal texts, and (most important) a commitment to the genreas a genre in the history of literary and artistic form.\"--Peter Betjemann, author ofTalking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the nineteenth century. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant form and surveys the fluidity in styles of illustration in serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children's literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Golden examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such asThe Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, andPeter Rabbit, and finds new expressions of this traditional genre in present-day graphic novel adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels likeThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She explores the various factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book--the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies--and how these ultimately created a mass market for new fiction. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the Household Edition of Dickens or the realist artists of the \"Sixties,\" notably Fred Barnard and John Tenniel, this volume examines the lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. It also discusses how a particular canon has been refashioned and repurposed for new generations of readers. Catherine J. Golden, professor of English at Skidmore College, is author of several books, includingPosting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing.\"A valuable and comprehensive survey of an enormous subject.\"--Paul Goldman, author ofReading Victorian Illustration, 1855-1875: Spoils of the Lumber Room \"A marvelous overview of how and why illustrations became an integral part of Victorian fiction. Golden documents a remarkable continuity from early nineteenth-century caricatures to realistic portrait-based illustrations to current graphic rewritings of familiar classics.\"--Martha Vicinus, author ofIntimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 \"A capacious and synthetic work that draws on a wide variety of scholarship, a very impressive command of the history of book illustration, a huge array of visual and verbal texts, and (most important) a commitment to the genreas a genre in the history of literary and artistic form.\"--Peter Betjemann, author ofTalking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption The Victorian illustrated book came into being, flourished, and evolved during the nineteenth century. Catherine Golden offers a new framework for viewing the arc of this vibrant form and surveys the fluidity in styles of illustration in serial instalments, British and American periodicals, adult and children's literature, and--more recently--graphic novels. Golden examines widely recognized illustrated texts, such asThe Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, andPeter Rabbit, and finds new expressions of this traditional genre in present-day graphic novel adaptations of the works of Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, as well as Neo-Victorian graphic novels likeThe League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She explores the various factors that contributed to the early popularity of the illustrated book--the growth of commodity culture, a rise in literacy, new printing technologies--and how these ultimately created a mass market for new fiction. While existing scholarship on Victorian illustrators largely centers on the Household Edition of Dickens or the realist artists of the \"Sixties,\" notably Fred Barnard and John Tenniel, this volume examines the lifetime of the Victorian illustrated book. It also discusses how a particular canon has been refashioned and repurposed for new generations of readers. Catherine J. Golden, professor of English at Skidmore College, is author of several books, includingPosting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing.

This article examines the reception of popular serial narratives. Starting from the assumption that this reception presents both a challenge (how to study the vast and heterogeneous readerly engagement with these texts?) and a chance (readers of such texts tend to comment profusely about the reception process), we identify the paratext as a privileged space of readerly communication on, and serial engagement with, popular storytelling. We develop the concept of “paratextual negotiation” as a means of understanding letter columns and fan forums as (now mostly) digital epitexts that shape the evolution of particularly popular—widely noticed, commercially successful, long-running—narratives, with a focus on the German science fiction pulp novel series Perry Rhodan (1961–) and additional thoughts on the US American comic book superhero Captain America (1941–). Taking the quantitative-empirical metrics of attention measurement and their public display seriously by identifying and close-reading the most popular forum threads and the most broadly recognized commentary about these narratives, we argue that the participatory element of popular culture can be reconstructed in the interplay between series text and serial paratext and can be described as a force in serial evolution that thrives on a combination of variation and redundancy and of selection and adaptation.

A publishing phenomenon began in Glasgow in 1765. Uniform pocket editions of the English Poets printed by Robert and Andrew Foulis formed the first link in a chain of literary products that has grown ever since, as we see from series like Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics. In this book, the author explores the origins of this phenomenon, analysing more than a dozen multi-volume poetry collections that sprang from the British press over the next half century. Why such collections flourished so quickly, who published them, what forms they assumed, how they were marketed and advertised, how they initiated their readers into the rites of mass-market consumerism, and what role they played in the construction of a national literature are all questions central to the study. The collections played out against an epic battle over copyright law, and involved fierce contention for market share in the ‘classics’ among rival publishers. It brought despair to the most powerful of London printers, William Strahan, who prophesied that competition of this nature would ruin bookselling, turning it into ‘the most pitiful, beggarly, precarious, unprofitable, and disreputable Trade in Britain’. Based on work with archival materials, newspapers, handbills, prospectuses, and above all the books themselves, the author's findings shed light on all aspects of the book trade. Valuable bibliographical data is presented regarding every collection, forming an indispensable resource for future work on the history of the English poetry canon.

Laurie Langbauer argues that our worldview is shaped not just by great public events but also by the most overlooked and familiar aspects of common life-\"the everyday.\" This sphere of the everyday has always been a crucial component of the novel, but has been ignored by many writers and critics and long associated with the writing of women. Focusing on the linked series of novels characteristic of later Victorian and early modern fiction-such as Margaret Oliphant's Carlingford Chronicles or the Sherlock Holmes stories-she investigates how authors make use of the everyday as a foundation to support their versions of realism. What happens when-in the series novel, or in contemporary theory-the everyday becomes a site of contestation and debate? Langbauer pursues this question through the novels of Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, and Arthur Conan Doyle-and in the writings of Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and John Galsworthy as they reflect on their Victorian predecessors. She also explores accounts of the everyday in the works of such theorists as Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Sigmund Freud, as well as materialist critics, including George Lukacs, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Her work shows how these writers link the series and the everyday in ways that reveal different approaches to comprehending the obscurity that makes up daily life.

The \"Big Deal\" looked like a good deal, a true win-win. But while the Big Deal has lowered the rate of serial price inflation, for many libraries the pricing remains unsustainable.