The Empathetic Author in the Internet Age: The Victorian Serialized Novel and the Internet Serial as Social Experience
by Alyssa Krasnansky
Faculty Intro:
“Alyssa’s essay grew out of an assignment for my spring 2017 seminar on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel that is both critically acclaimed and beloved by (many) readers. Rather than requiring everyone to write a research essay on Middlemarch, I invited students to pursue a topic of their choice that related in some way to novels and readers. I encouraged them, if they had something in mind that they’d always wanted to write about, to take this opportunity to do so. Alyssa chose to write this deeply researched, very insightful essay connecting serialized texts then and now.” – Juliette Wells
From the Author:
“Serialized fiction was the norm in the 19th century, and now, in the 21st, it’s making a comeback. This paper explores the differences between serialization then and now, paying special attention to the impacts of author-reader interaction. With serial publication, the author and reader communicate during the writing process, but between the 19th and 21st centuries, the purposes and consequences of these communications vary. In the 19th century, flagging magazine sales could be the death sentence to a novel-in-progress; this paper asks how the content of those novels had to adapt itself to minimize the risk of being dropped. Today, the Internet has opened the door to serialization as an alternative to traditional publishing; this paper asks which authors, demographically, take the serialization versus traditional route, and how author-reader interaction has created a print culture of empathy that many find lacking in traditional publishing.
My interest in this topic is personal, as co-writer of the web serial Prairie Song. As I made connections in online serialization, I realized how under-researched Internet serialization is as a contemporary print culture. I wanted to explore the motivations and outcomes of Internet serialization as compared to our cultural baseline for serialized fiction: the works of Dickens, Eliot, and their contemporaries.”
Copyrights of all Verge articles and editorial material belong to the authors.
