Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera

by Jennifer Hayward

" ""To be continued... "" Whether these words fall at a season-ending episode of Star Trek or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. Jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre -- one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called "family resemblances." These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, an such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre and to analyze the peculiar draw that serials have upon their Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend, Milton Canif's comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and the soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live. Hayward argues that serial audiences have developed active strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process. In this way fans have forced serial producers to acknowledge the power of the audience.

Genres: Nonfiction

228 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 1997

About the author

Jennifer Hayward is Professor of English at the College of Wooster. Her research focuses on British travellers in the Americas. Besides essays on travel writing and ethnic, race and gender identities, her books include Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions (1997) and scholarly editions of Maria Graham's 1824 Journal of a Residence in Chile and Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (co-edited with Soledad Caballero).

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an informative, imaginative study of serial fiction from the Victorian period and the influence through todays serial soap operas, prime time series television show, hyper-fiction on the web, etc.

It is an enlightening view of fiction influenced by commerce. A must for writers in "serial" genres, literature and media majors.

[Alex Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting overview of three different phases of the serial form - Dickens and the novel, mid 20th c. cartoons and then late 20th c. Soap opera.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduces a lot of foundational issues about communal reading/viewing practices and seriality.