Rationing narratives? : the shifting paradigms of serialised fiction

Abstract

In September 2004, a television show about a group of plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island started the harrowing and ongoing tale of a group of characters that would capture the imagination of millions worldwide for the next six years. In an age of commodities and instant gratification, the appearance and popularity of LOST seems to signify an anomaly. Why would audiences torture themselves by waiting for years for narrative resolution? Yet for the past two centuries, there appears to have been a long history of similiar texts, and as many eager audiences ready to consume them. This study attempts to contextualise and understand the contemporary serial scene for the mass media of television and the internet, with a particular focus on narrative aesthetics. By using a historical poetics approach, a variety of texts are brought into the argument, which are then employed to broadly explore the poetics of the serial discourse against the backdrop of the prevailing mode or technology of a particular era. It is divided into four chapters, book-ended by an introduction and a conclusion, with each chapter organised to roughly correspond with particular historical divisions in the development of serial narrative. The introduction explains the rationale and the approach which the research follows. The first chapter brings the reader up to date with the earliest days of the form, locating the origins of today's serial fiction within the context of Victorian print culture. The second chapter is concerned with the broad developments of serial fiction during the twentieth century, touching on radio but mainly focusing on audiovisual texts aired on the medium of television within the past two decades. Chapter three discusses the parallel medium of the Internet as a new emerging platform for serial fiction. The last chapter attempts to identify the major characteristics of the discourse across all these shifts. To conclude, a look at the possible futures of serialisation as a narrative discourse is provided.