The Empathetic Author in the Internet Age: The Victorian Serialized Novel and the Internet Serial as Social Experience

Abstract

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.