Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels

Recovers the careers of four US women serial writers, and establishes a new archive for American literary studies.

This book shows how serials deployed the repetition of plots and the traumas representing the sources of women's anxieties and pain. It addresses how American literature scholars engaged with expanding the range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's novels, especially as those fictions are available on HathiTrust and other digital services.Nineteenth-Century American Women's Serial Novels explores the prolific careers of four exemplary novelists - E. D. E. N. Southworth, Ann Stephens, Mary Jane Holmes, and Laura Jean Libbey. These commercially successful writers helped to shape the popular tradition of serial magazine fiction by drawing on readers' tastes along with their cultural concerns. Their astonishing productivity led magazine editors and publishers to return to them repeatedly for more serials to be turned into even more novels, even as they reprinted these fictions under new titles. Dale M. Bauer analyzes how serials deployed the repetition of plots and the traumas representing the sources of women's anxieties and pain. Arguing that these novels provided temporary resolutions to the social, economic, and psychological tensions that readers faced, Bauer explains how this otherwise forgotten archive of fiction now offers an extraordinarily expanded range of women's literary effort from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.