Serial Policization: On the cultural Work of American City Mysteries

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Daniel Stein
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: Funded in 2013
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 68338857

The success of European feuilleton novels (Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, 1842- 1843; George Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, 1844-1846) spawned a new American popular genre: the city mysteries, written between 1844 and 1860 by authors such as George Lippard, Ned Buntline, George Thompson, and Osgood Bradbury. Their thematic concerns and media practices positioned these series as influential players of (and within) an emergent American popular culture in the antebellum era. Utilizing sensationalistic and melodramatic techniques, the city mysteries made a case for social reform at an explicitly national level, thus contributing to the self-reflections of a rapidly modernizing and territorially expanding society. Their thematic repertoire comprised urbanization as fascination and threat, the fate of republican and regional-democratic ideals in a nationalized public sphere, the relationship of populist agitation and party corruption, the exploitation of the working class by powerful capitalists, etc. However, these critical negotiations of antebellum modernity relied on a media practice that itself was essentially modern, viz. serial, commercial, and transregionally active, and that can therefore be seen as an important origin of popular-serial culture in the United States. The subproject views the city mystery genre as an influential actor within a dynamic network of cultural practices. It investigates (1) an early form of popular seriality at the moment of its explicit advocacy of an imagined national community, holding (2) that, due to their serial production, distribution, and reception, city mysteries not only represent the conflicts of their era but make politics (possible): they structure the field of political agency and participate in the genesis and reproduction of practical politics in the decades before the Civil War. The subproject thus investigates the politicizing dynamics of popular seriality, i.e. the interconnections between serial genre development and modern practices of the political (translocal and transregional party organization, forms of publicity, agitation, etc.), focusing on a compelling but hitherto understudied textual corpus of American literature. Within the architecture of the Research Unit, the subproject works as a synchronic complement to TP-HG2 (German periodicals, 1850-1890), allowing for a transnational comparison of nineteenth-century serial narrative forms, strategies, and political functions. Diachronically, it provides a historical basis for TP-HG3 (film serials, 1910-1940), especially concerning the role of serial narrative structures for the self-thematization of an American "mass culture." Building on TP4, it investigates how popular series offer differentiated role identities to a diffuse (mass) audience. Moreover, it follows TP5 (on serial one-upmanship) by analyzing serial competition not only at the textual and generic levels but also at the level of political positions. Finally, it reconstructs the prehistory of pulp novels (Heftromane), a serial form analyzed in TP6 and TP7.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1091: Popular Seriality: Aesthetics and Practice