INTRODUCTION

Musing on periodicals and their relationship to time, journal editor Ludwig Börne combines the commonplace notion of the periodical as a timepiece with the assertion that journals have a very material effect on the world and our experience of it. According to Börne, journals do not merely measure time like the hands of a clock; rather, they are akin to the clock’s “engine itself, that keeps the gears of time moving regularly and that measures their progressions.”¹ The idea that newspapers and journals affect the perception and structure of time was quite familiar to nineteenth-century authors, editors, and readers; in this book I expand on this idea and explore how a range of experiments in literary and journalistic writing shapes temporal awareness. If, as Marshall McLuhan argues, “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or patterns that it introduces into human affairs,” then one of the key messages of nineteenth-century print media is that they shape readers’ sense of time.² Like other transformative technologies such as the telegraph and railway, periodicals create new forms of communication and “new kinds of work and leisure” (as McLuhan puts it) with corresponding alterations in the experience of these activities’ temporal components.³ The period under study—the 1780s to the 1850s, sometimes called the age of European revolution—is commonly characterized as ushering in a modern or “new” time, die Moderne or Neuzeit. From a media-historical perspective, though, the nineteenth century is first and foremost a “news and newspaper modernity” (Zeitungsmoderne), as Gerhard von Graevenitz has put it.⁴ In this book, I seek to center format and genre conventions characteristic of this news and newspaper modernity—fashion reporting, miscellaneous urban sketches, serialized correspondence reports, recurring new year’s greetings, caricatures, and more—and show how they both thematize and structure time itself, how, in other words, they write time.

Across Europe and in German-speaking lands in particular, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness the emergence of recognizably modern cultural and political journalism as it appears in new types of literary magazines and political reporting based in the daily newspaper. The periodical press had grown in earnest in the seventeenth century with the first scholarly journals and newspapers, while the eighteenth century delivered to broader reading audiences a diversified array of journals, including mid-century moral weeklies, which in German were often modeled on English predecessors such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711–1712) or The Tatler (1709–1711). A range of Enlightenment journals, including review and popular-scientific or scholarly publications such as Die Berlinische Monatsschrift (The Berlin monthly) (1783–1996), as well as fashion and cultural journals such as C. M. Wieland’s Der Teutsche Merkur (The German mercury) (1773–1790), played an instrumental role in expanding the number of publications for lay readers and shifting reading habits toward the “extensive” consumption of new material. It is the French Revolution, though, that precipitates the rise of newly influential cultural and political journals, magazines, and newspapers. The 1790s is a decade of tremendous growth in journal publication, building on the accelerated emergence of new journals in previous decades relative to the early and mid-eighteenth century.⁵ In German-speaking lands, this period witnesses the rise of modern newspapers, including the Augsburg-based Allgemeine Zeitung (General newspaper) (1798–1929), with correspondent reports from European capitals promising the latest political and cultural news. The 1790s also witnesses the emergence of leading (if in certain cases short-lived) literary and art-historical journals, including F. Schiller’s Die Horen (The Horae) (1795–1797), F. and A. W. Schlegel’s Athenäum (Athenaeum) (1798–1800), and J. W. von Goethe’s Propyläen (Propylaea) (1798–1800). Such journals break with the mid-century weeklies’ repertoire of moral lessons and instead task themselves with responding to the unprecedented events of the present through new literary and philosophical undertakings. This period likewise witnesses the founding of leading cultural journals such as the Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of luxury and fashion) (1798–1823), the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (Morning pages for the educated classes) (1807–1865), the Zeitung für die Elegante Welt (Paper for the elegant world) (1801–1859), and the slightly later Viennese publication the Wiener Zeitschrift fùr Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode (Viennese journal for art, literature, theater, and fashion) (1817–1849), whose title encapsulates the thematic range of these journals. Serialized across multiple daily, weekly, or monthly installments, such journals shape the way readers encounter literary, journalistic, and critical texts in proximity to other miscellaneous contents.

In this book, I refer to serial literature primarily as the contents and reporting of both cultural journals (Zeitschriften) and daily newspapers (Zeitungen), though I largely focus on literary-leaning examples of the former. These journals and newspapers share certain key features, including a heterogeneous mixture of textual (and in many cases visual) forms and the assumption that more installments are to come, in contrast to the self-contained book. Print historians commonly refer to such installment-based publications as serial print or serials. Serial formats play an outsize role in the period under study because they are well suited to keeping up with changing circumstances and they generate a sense of movement through time; indeed, this sense of movement leads to the common perception of new installments of printed literature as a kind of watery “flow” that adds to an ever-growing “sea” of print.⁶ Readers come to be trained in the expectation that the latest news will come with the next day’s, week’s, or month’s installment, that various events are taking place simultaneously, and that the future will likely bring something unexpected. Cultural journals are associated with urban life and developments in politics, fashion, the arts, commerce, science, and other aspects of society that depend on and generate time-specific information. Over time, periodicals come to rival the book “as the dominant textual medium of intellectual exchange, social commentary, and entertainment,” for they offer currentness (Aktualität), newness, and a varied mixture of information and entertainment.⁷ For readers in provincial locations—that is, most of the German-speaking public—journal editors and authors seek to make their readers’ encounters with correspondence reports and literary entertainment a weekly or even daily routine. This routinized, temporally punctuated media landscape can be characterized as a kind of “serial culture” that spans Europe and the world and that morphs and expands as the century progresses.⁸

The French Revolution observed at a distance is a key feature of this serial culture: as Hannah Arendt points out, modern German thought originates in the observation of the revolution “from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle.”⁹ Journals function as sites to process the unfolding of the transformative events in the wake of the revolution, to look back at the recent past, and to conjecture about the future. Indeed, the goal of many new journals founded in this era is to provide readers with a cultural “history of the present,” or Zeitgeschichte, and experiment with how to write the history of revolutionary events that are still perceived to be ongoing. Throughout the nineteenth century, journals—“our fortifications,” as Heinrich Heine called them—would remain key vantage points from which to offer political and cultural commentary.¹⁰ Writers don the mantle of Zeitschriftsteller, a late eighteenth-century neologism connoting a writer (Schriftsteller) who writes for journals (Zeitschriften) and in the service of “the times” (die Zeit). Like the revolution itself, journals and newspapers become symbolic not only of what is current but of temporal complexity and of the confrontation between the old and new.

Journals are also essential and tangible commodities in the print marketplace of the period, especially with the rising demand for illustrated fashion journalism from a German audience eager for the latest fashions from Paris and London. With their hand-colored fashion plates, these journals serve as sites for the delectation of luxury objects and other commodities, but they are also forms of print luxury in their own right and compete with pocketbooks (Taschenbücher), other seasonal gift books, and literary annuals. The increasingly diverse range of formats and venues to which writers could contribute leads to new styles of authorship based in both multiauthor journals and single-author books. In the process, writers rethink the function of miscellaneous formats vis-à-vis the status and desirability of single-author editions. Throughout this book I explore different reflections on the commodity status of serial print at the intersections of periodical literature and more bookish, single-author modes of writing, and I foreground writers who bring the logic of journal-based authorship to bear on their oeuvre.

I thereby hope to remedy certain limitations of book-centered literary history in which the contexts and conventions of journal publication disappear. Serial forms diverge from the temporal footprint of the stand-alone literary work and visual image and call out for new approaches to crafting literary- and cultural-historical narratives. It can be easy to forget that most literary works of the period first appeared in serialized form in journals or anthologies, such as pocketbooks or almanacs. Book-centric scholarship reinforces canonization and the retrospective editorial decisions that put writings into critical editions. In calling for this shift in focus, I draw on book- and media-historical scholarship that examines the historical specificities of publication formats and the poetics of collective groupings of texts rather than the hermeneutics of single works, while also trying to avoid a certain amount of lingering bias in favor of the book. To be sure, book and print history have tracked the role of periodicals in shifting reading practices, disseminating revolutionary ideas, and overconfidently spreading visions of the book’s obsolescence. However, at the same time that scholars conclude that the book as such does not exist, many continue to privilege stand-alone works as normative textual units.¹¹ I seek instead to recenter serial forms in our understanding of the literary and media history of the period. As a result, the sections of this book gravitate toward smaller forms predicated on open-ended continuation rather than toward self-contained forms such as the novel, novella, or lyric poem. Serial forms create conditions for “writing time” by profiting off a sense of incompletion and embracing contingent relationships of proximity. Of course, there are also challenges to writing literary and media history that focus on serial forms: the corpus is potentially unlimited, and the conundrums of selection and focus are frequent and daunting. The methodological choice to view textual units or images as part of a series brings with it the awareness that coordinates for mapping serial literature can be established on the basis of different factors. As Frank Kelleter remarks, “one and the same text can be regarded as simultaneously serial and non-serial, depending on the perspective from which it is seen—or, more properly, depending on the historical situation in which its textual activities are mobilized in one way or another.”¹² Dives into the sea of serial print seem destined primarily to resurface with case studies, and this fact informs the structure of this book, which is organized around several author- and journal-focused studies. At the same time, I also present some generalizable conclusions about how serial forms shape the understanding of time in the period in question and beyond.

Temporalization and Seriality

Serial formats are both caught up in and agents of what Reinhart Koselleck has described as the “temporalization” of social, cultural, and political experience. Temporalization names the process of concepts and metaphors being infused with coefficients of movement and change, as the semantics governing a range of realms of life become historicized and linked to specific temporal frameworks. Temporalization generates characteristically modern shapes of time, including forms of linear progression (time’s arrow) that supplant patterns of cyclical return (time’s cycle) or moments of transition and transformation between past and future, as in Koselleck’s Sattelzeit, which refers to the period between 1770 and 1830.¹³ For Koselleck, the geographical metaphor of a saddle or pass between two points of higher elevation also entails a “Janus-faced” gaze backward into the past and forward into the future.¹⁴ As many historians have noted, the Sattelzeit is a transitional era when different historiographical regimes come into conflict amid the emergence of history writing as an academic discipline. In the process, the present comes to be perceived to contain multiple competing times, to manifest the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen).¹⁵ Literature and criticism play a particularly central role in this process; as Dirk Göttsche writes, “one of the most striking stylistic features of the new, critical sense of time and history in German literature during the 1790s is the emergence of a metaphoric of time, a system of metaphors which express the period’s heightened awareness of historical crisis and of both political and epistemological challenge in terms of temporal experience.”¹⁶ In delving into the particular status of seriality and serial literature as “techniques of temporalization” (to use Wolf Lepenies’s term¹⁷), I build on what Christopher Clark has referred to as historical and literary studies’ recent “temporal turn.”¹⁸

Scholars across a variety of disciplines have shown how serial forms undergo significant expansion in the nineteenth century, an era, as Benedict Anderson notes, when the “logic of seriality” gives rise to “a new grammar of representation.”¹⁹ On a general level, a series is a set or sequence of multiple entities organized on the basis of the relationships of these different parts; the Latin serere means to join together or bind. Reihe (row), the German term for series, has clear spatial connotations and evokes a sense of sequential viewing. A common distinction is between series with a closed set of terms and those with open-ended and ongoing terms; Anderson, for example, describes how the nineteenth-century census is based on a conception of a “bound” series—x number of inhabitants, no more, no less—and identifies newspapers and popular performances as sites of “unbound” seriality.²⁰ Cultural history is familiar with closed episodic forms such as cycles of poems, song, and images.²¹ The print landscape is also a particularly important catalyst for unbound seriality, wherein writers, editors, and readers are all constantly involved in placing ensembles of texts and images into various serial “constellations.”²² Prominent studies of the nineteenth-century literary landscape have foregrounded the effects of serialization on the novel and other self-contained narrative structures,²³ while others have focused on quintessentially small forms that reveal the intermedial resonances of print and performance.²⁴ Scholars have examined the European rise of the illustrated periodical and explored the popular seriality at the heart of the mass press of the second half of the nineteenth century and the afterlives of the writings of popular male and female authors across various print formats.²⁵ Seriality has been explored as a central feature of technical and industrial manufacturing and the mechanical production of multiple identical items.²⁶ Scholars have thereby examined the media-based preconditions of nineteenth-century realism, including the technology of the steam-powered rotary printing press (invented in 1843), advances in mechanized image reproduction, and the mass distribution of late-century family journals such as the Gartenlaube.²⁷ More recently, theories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular entertainment have described serial television and video in terms of ongoing, episodic storytelling based in the repetition and alteration of genre conventions such as the cliff-hanger, which is commonly traced back to nineteenth-century print.²⁸

Building on this work, I am particularly interested in the effects serial forms have in modeling the passing of time, creating new senses of the present, and allowing new points of access to the past, present, and future. The genres and format conventions that I situate at the heart of serial print and cultural journalism—urban sketches, correspondence reports, fashion plates and caricatures, miscellanies and proliferating continuations, and more—are instrumental in shaping the pace and scale of modern life and worth examining more closely. Following other projects that return to nineteenth-century small forms such as the feuilleton or the operetta to find traces of an emergent modernity, whether Walter Benjamin’s archaeologies of the nineteenth-century urban landscape or Siegfried Kracauer’s rediscovery of Jacques Offenbach’s Paris, I explore how sometimes quotidian or unassuming forms had an outsize effect on nineteenth-century experience and allow for the past to be reencountered in new ways.²⁹ That said, examining the earlier nineteenth century runs the risk of simply framing it as a prequel to later developments such as the mass press in the second half of the nineteenth century or the birth of cinema. This book’s case studies linger with this earlier pretechnical period leading up to the eve of mass printing as key for reflections on seriality and time, while also suggesting ways that this period is attuned to concerns familiar to other historical epochs and media constellations such as information overload, the inundation of images, and the attempt to find historical perspective in ephemera. Focusing on the German-speaking context of European news and newspaper modernity brings to light the unique and sustained contributions that German writers, editors, artists and readers make in reconceptualizing cultural journalism, the serialized flow of images, the literary work, and the task of history writing.

Writing Time

Throughout this book, and indeed in its title, I use the term “writing time” not only as shorthand for experiments by authors, editors, and artists in writing about and depicting time but also for the function of serial forms to organize and structure time itself. In calling this structuring potential “writing,” I take my lead in part from the programmatic imbrication of time and writing at the heart of the self-understanding of nineteenth-century writers and journalists via terms such as Zeitschriftsteller, “history writer” (Geschichtsschreiber), and “journalist.” The association of the act of writing with a permanently unfolding chronicle of the times is at the heart of a variety of journalistic and literary endeavors. This common use of writing as shorthand for print publication underlies the fact that print is the dominant storage medium of the time.³⁰ Techniques of writing and print publication play a central part in influential studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transformations of literary, scholarly, and bureaucratic institutions, and Friedrich Kittler’s media-theoretical work is perhaps the most prominent (and provocative) of these.³¹ Kittler places a notion of writing as “serial, that is temporally transposed, data flow” at the heart of his account of the Romantic system of writing, or Aufschreibesystem.³² Kittler shows how around 1800 writing is central for displaying competence both as a civil servant and as an author of original literary works. He thereby defines writing more generally as an inherently temporalizing technique, for it fixes language, speech, and visual imagery in external forms and allows these components to be stored, circulated, and reencountered at different times: writing and other media are, as Sibylle Krämer puts it, “modalities of time management” that alter “the irreversibility of the flow of time.”³³ For Kittler, nineteenth-century literature is a transformative culmination of writing’s potential for creating a hallucinatory flow of imaginary sounds and images, though it is destined to be supplanted by twentieth-century analog recording media and their ability to store and transmit sound and image.³⁴ Kittler’s vision of media as modes of manipulating time encourages us to examine the varied, and at times countervailing, functions of print in shaping the experience of time. However, taking a more careful look at the literary landscape requires going beyond Kittler’s rather undifferentiated account of print formats, an account that results from his guiding concern with the break between print and technical media such as radio and film rather than with the diverse modalities of nineteenth-century print.

The work of the United States–based art historian George Kubler (1912–1996) helps us to explore in more detail how print formats put various sorts of information into conjunctive and disjunctive constellations and how these constellations have varied temporal significances. Kubler proposes that we understand different series of similar material things produced over time—iterations of a particular style of pottery, a particular literary genre, a particular architectural feature, or a particular publishing rubric across multiple decades or centuries—as generating different “shapes” or forms of time.³⁵ Such series develop according to their own time frames, which can span multiple generations or be short bursts. As a historian of premodern art, Kubler is interested in, among other things, forms of pottery and building styles that in certain cases are stylistically consistent across multiple centuries.³⁶ Differently structured sequences have different temporal shapes, and in many cases such shapes are in operation simultaneously. Kubler likewise foregrounds the role of historiography in constellating different objects and creating retrospective shapes of time. Glossing Kubler, Siegfried Kracauer suggests that the coexistence of such shapes unsettles the construct of time as a diachronic, linear flow: “The shaped times of the diverse areas overshadow the uniform flow of time.”³⁷ At stake, as Kracauer puts it, is not the “March of Time,” but the “march of times.”³⁸ Kubler thus gives us tools for analyzing how various series can model linear succession and synchronic simultaneity. Print in particular lends itself to this kind of analysis, for individual serial forms aggregate component parts but they also operate in a landscape where other serial aggregations proliferate.³⁹ Seriality comes into view not just as one particular shape of time created by a sequence of similar things but also as an enabling feature, a template of sorts for the generation of multiple, often divergent shapes of time.

The Timeliness and Untimeliness of Serial Forms

Serial print’s effects on temporal awareness can be further accessed from a variety of perspectives, and in the remainder of this introduction, I consider two in particular. First, I’d like to explore from an intellectual-historical perspective how serial patterning competes with certain predominant models of time based in the natural world and history writing, respectively. Second, I’ll turn to a more print- and media-historical account of the constitutive elements of serial print.

Patterns of biological life and historical eventfulness are perhaps the most fundamental frameworks human beings have used to make sense of their temporal existence, and they have given rise to some of the most enduring figures through which we conceive of time. That said, conceptions of life and human history both undergo significant transformation in the nineteenth century. This transformation includes the natural sciences’ discovery of the “deep time” of the planet and the human species, the natural sciences’ discovery of the microtemporalities of the climate and of biological organisms, and the early social sciences’ exploration of physiognomy and social types. The temporalization of concepts of biological, cultural, and political life also entails a growing awareness of the historical situation of all peoples, and the nineteenth century is of course when the philosophy of history, historicism, and modern academic historiography emerge. Seen against this backdrop, serial media come into view as both timely and untimely, as alternately integral parts of projects of nineteenth-century knowledge production and countervailing irritants to such projects. To be sure, serial formats are key tools for producing timely, new knowledge about life: serialized novels help narrate the course of an individual’s life, and episodic travelogues of scientific exploration and discovery, culminating in Darwin, help to reimagine the lives of nations and of the human race.⁴⁰ National literary canons rely not only on a broad sense of the “life” of the nation but also on the connection of a sequence of works to the lives of individual authors. Historians, in turn, have likewise long depended on serial forms to lend structure to historical time, whether by the year-to-year chronicling of historical events or by leaning on concepts of linear unfolding or modernizing progression. Through segmentation and the promise of continuation, historians use serial forms to break the past into distinct epochs and manage expectations about the future. However, serial forms can also generate shapes of time that break with temporal figures of monodirectional historical unfolding and can thus be seen as untimely counterpoints to predominant organicist and historicist shapes of time. Considering the particularities of serial form reveals specific media times that cannot be subsumed into natural or historical time.

Ephemerality and the Time of Life

The association of serial print with ephemerality has been ubiquitous since the early days of print and remained a commonplace in the nineteenth century.⁴¹ In Ancient Greek, ephemeros means daily or lasting a single day; it is also the word for insects and plants with short life spans. The association of print with the impermanence of life builds on long-standing traditions of meditating on the transience (Vergänglichkeit) of the world. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century genre painting, for example, depicts the decay of biological life in still-life, memento mori, and vanitas motifs and allegorical scenes of everyday life through a variety of interchangeable tropes evocative of the fleetingness of human affairs: skulls, dust and smoke, instruments of time measurement, natural objects in various states of decay, various features of the seasons, and various kinds of paper, writing, and print. At the same time as they encourage viewers to contemplate frames of time, though, these images operate within an abiding detemporalized Christian religious-philosophical worldview. From the perspective of divine eternity, all worldly transience is a repetition of the same. To the extent that worldly life is equivalently transient, individual scenes remain “irredeemably ahistorical,” for they represent archetypal structures rather than unique historical events.⁴²

Various scholars have shown how modern understandings of time revalue the Christian concept of Vergänglichkeit. Sociologists have dated the beginnings of modern conceptions of time to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when, as Niklas Luhmann argues, the functional differentiation of social life starts to decouple experiences of time from the individual life cycle.⁴³ Elena Esposito shows how the emergent discourse of fashion in particular frees tropes of transience from religious connotations of permanence and impermanence.⁴⁴ Similarly, Hans Blumenberg has described how modern science discovers micro- and macrotemporal scales incommensurate with the time of individual life. In his far-reaching study of conceptions of the times of life (Lebenszeit) and of the world (Weltzeit) and their shifting interrelation throughout history, Blumenberg explores the effects of diverse systems of knowledge on temporal awareness and the ambivalent relationships of these systems to experiences of time anthropologically grounded in individual life.⁴⁵ Blumenberg’s study includes a consideration of how Enlightenment scholars come to terms with scientific progress as something that transcends the time span of individual scientists’ lives, for example, and how the nineteenth century historicizes the understanding of world time. It is a consensus view in this scholarship that various print formats play a central role in shaping perceptions of time, whether in the realm of fashion journalism, yearly calendars and almanacs, or scientific journals.⁴⁶ Serial formats are commonly tied to seasonal, calendrical, or otherwise cyclical shapes of time but also open onto more indeterminate temporal frameworks. To take one example, we might consider the common journal title Ephemerides. This term originally referred to the movement of planets and stars over the course of the year before becoming, in the eighteenth century, a general synonym for a periodical that tracks ongoing events across a variety of realms, including theater, the literary market, and commerce. In effect, the periodical landscape’s calibration with calendrical time is loosened as it comes to track the logics of different social and cultural realms.

Serial print’s propensity for going quickly out of date and being quickly discarded is the basis for associating it with the brevity of life. Yet the figure of print ephemerality is likewise a point of contrast to a different life-related metaphor at work in the literary realm, namely that of the literary work as an organic whole, which pits ephemerality against the notion of a fully realized, “living” form. As it develops in the late eighteenth century, the notion of the work as organism posits the coherent relation of component parts of the work and its formation, genesis, or Bildung.⁴⁷ This sense of the work is a cornerstone of idealist aesthetics and is often associated with the place in the author’s biographical development that the work represents. Furthermore, the concept of the work helps critics, authors, and readers to distinguish the works of canonical authors from the heterogeneity of periodical literature and to valorize classicizing shapes of time organized around notions of completion and monumentality. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of the bildungsroman are informed by the intertwining concepts of formation and development favored by so many novelists, philosophers, historians, and scientists of the period.

The term Entwicklung (development, unfolding) shows how certain concepts can be associated both with life and its inanimate media-based alternatives. On the one hand, the term connotes the development of an individual person, providing a shape of time proper to the bildungsroman and other realist genres: the story is over when the hero’s formation is complete or when all knots have been disentangled.⁴⁸ On the other hand, though, writers apply connotations of unwrapping, unfolding, and disentangling to the print landscape, envisioning it as a complexly knotted or entangled system made up of unrelated materials.⁴⁹ In the 1798 introduction to their journal London und Paris (London and Paris), for example, F. J. Bertuch and K. A. Böttiger call upon readers to imagine the current “age of paper” as a “thousandfold intertwined knot [Knäuel] of written and oral traditions,” yet they defer the project of “disentangling” (entwirren) this knot to some future historian.⁵⁰ Gerhard von Graevenitz’s account of the late nineteenth-century’s cultural imaginary likewise invokes the metaphor of a knot. For Graevenitz, the temporal awareness of the epoch is a “grotesque chronotope” made up of the coexistence of multiple images of historical time: “a knot of time [Zeitknäuel] that is without direction … and that is made up of discontinuities, of things that don’t fit together, and of quick labile and explosive alternations; and at the knot’s core [is] a zone of coldness and anxiety.”⁵¹ For Graevenitz, this shape of time is grounded in the media culture of the period: illustrated journals, exhibitions and world’s fairs, and novels and other literary genres. It is the media landscape, in other words, rather than the time of individual life, that generates this knotted, entangled time and that serves as an unruly backdrop for the many attempts to posit coherence and organic unity in the period.

Scholars have come down differently on the question of seriality’s timeliness in reconceptualizing human life in the nineteenth century. In their study of the Victorian serial, for example, Linda Hughes and Michael Lund argue that serial forms offer new ways of representing the temporalities of individual lives, with uncertainty about how fictional narratives will end paralleling readers’ uncertainties about their own futures.⁵² Carl Gelderloos’s work on early twentieth-century modernist photobooks also shows how artists and writers use mechanical media technologies to “privilege biological and natural temporalities.”⁵³ Helmut Müller-Sievers takes a different tack, exploring how serial forms transcend the parameters of individual life and “natural” time. Serialized fiction, like the serial television of the early twenty-first century, generates the sense that multiple series are going on simultaneously: “The series allows for an experience of time that is not the supposedly personal time of the individual, the time that is broken up into daily segments.”⁵⁴ In occurring without our awareness and even potentially continuing after our own deaths, series give readers and viewers a sense of the difference between “our time” and “time without us”: “[the series] will continue like the world on the day after our death.”⁵⁵ Building on Blumenberg’s reflections on disjunctions between Lebenszeit and Weltzeit, Müller-Sievers encourages us to think about how the times of serial media have recursive effects on times that we think of as our own, times proper to our own lives.⁵⁶ More generally, Müller-Sievers prompts us to consider how serial media create shapes of time that point to structures that are more expansive—or more miniscule—than those contained by any notion of life. I return to serial formats’ divergences from patterns of natural time at key moments throughout my book, for these divergences help to structure the coordinates upon which the authors and editors I discuss write time.⁵⁷

“Untimely” Histories?

The nineteenth century likewise witnesses the competition of multiple modes of historiography ahead of the consolidation of history as an academic discipline. As Reinhart Koselleck has shown, the early to mid-nineteenth century is not only a time in which contemporary history writing flourishes but also a time in which academic history writing increasingly breaks with an understanding of history writing as writing the history of the present in favor of an ideal of writing histories of the past and of “completed” historical events.⁵⁸ Serial forms—the lectures, journals, and book series of which scholars, journalists, critics, and would-be politicians make ample use to address current events—are both timely and untimely: they propel developments in history writing and in the processing of the recent past, yet they are disparaged by the gatekeepers of historical knowledge production. G. W. F. Hegel, for example, dismisses journalism as a venue for writing history for it lacks the proper overview and “transforms all events into reports.”⁵⁹ Hegel’s rejection of historical journalism is based on an ideal of systematic coherence, or Zusammenhang, related to the concept of the organic work. Throughout the book, I will return to historical projects at the margins of academic history writing that trouble both Hegel’s idealist philosophy of history and the historicist emphasis on completed events and that embrace the contingencies of serial formats. These projects include reporting about the revolution through the lens of fashion and popular culture, returning to archived newspapers and journals of past decades, and reactualizing the past by republishing anonymously published newspaper articles.

Koselleck’s work proves particularly useful in exploring how various projects of history writing might offer alternatives to the shapes of time particular to the modern philosophy of history. Much of his early and mid-career work is dedicated to showing how modern social and political concepts emerge in tandem with the philosophy of history, which posits modernity’s teleological directionality. In Koselleck’s account, nineteenth-century history writing breaks with the earlier rhetorical-humanist model of multiple histories; this earlier model assumes that historical events can be understood on the basis of a set inventory of interpretive topoi and that the lessons of the past remain applicable because human life and experience remain constant. By contrast, the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution erode the expectation that the past will repeat itself, a process that represents the “destruction of natural chronology.”⁶⁰ The philosophy of history responds to uncertainty about the future with a linear model of time based in concepts of progress, revolution, Enlightenment, the state, and more, as well as in a vision of singular “world history” corresponding to the movement of the human race toward a common goal. For Koselleck, such an orientation envisions the future on the basis of philosophical concepts rather than historical experience, and it runs the risk of misunderstanding the present and past.

Koselleck then faces the challenge of keeping sight of a plurality of historical times in an age when history in the singular is ascendant. As part of his broader theory of history, or Historik, he tracks how divergent experiences of events lead to divergent historical representations, how modernity’s emphasis on the new obscures patterns of repetition and recurrence, and how longer-term structures cut across individual generations and historical epochs alike, drawing on Fernand Braudel’s notion of longue durée.⁶¹ In contrast to the historiographical ideal of systematic coherence and totality, Koselleck turns to the realm of geology for imagining the succession and simultaneity of multiple times. The term he uses is Zeitschichten, or sediments or layers of time, which he defines as “multiple temporal levels of differing duration and varied origin that are nonetheless simultaneously present and effective.”⁶² Presented as shorthand for the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, the concept of Zeitschichten envisions the accumulation and storage of different temporalities: natural times, historical times, technical times, cultural and political times, and more. Koselleck thereby casts his own theory of historical time as untimely to a certain extent, for he takes aim at the self-conception of modernity even while being a product of it. Koselleck places particular importance on literary and visual forms as techniques of visualizing and representing time, and he identifies Goethe in particular as a kindred spirit. Goethe’s approach to history is open-ended and provisional, and his oeuvre comes into view as a set of interrelated texts that produces a sense of overlapping frames of time.⁶³ Goethe is “untimely” in his resistance to the systematic thrust of idealist philosophy, his disregard for a singular “world history,” and his pursuit of multiple histories in a variety of different forms of writing.⁶⁴ Despite being a rather clichéd scholarly mode (what male German Bildungsbürger has not at one time compared himself to Goethe?), Koselleck’s valorization of Goethe helps us to envision how literary experiments can write time in variegated ways that resist the teleology of the philosophical concept and that resist being reduced to metahistorical tropes based on literary genre.⁶⁵ Yet his study of Goethe also calls for examining other nineteenth-century historiographical projects that are in critical dialogue with the philosophy of history. The figures under exploration in my book share an interest in venturing out into the sea of print in search of shapes of historical time, provide us with more differentiated visions of the temporal awareness of the age, and help us to rethink the format conditions of modes of history writing more generally.

Elements of Serial Print

I turn now to a more print- and media-historical consideration of the basic techniques through which print formats organize distinct elements into serial patterns. Again, the term “serial” connotes linking and joining together, and I am interested in how serial forms can link both unlike and like things. On the one hand, through genre rubrics such as the miscellany, the notion of the journal as archival repository, and the conceit that journals present readers with a “flow” of multiple images readers are encouraged to explore the accidental, incidental, or disjunctive relationships of mixed contents. These conventions are all based in periodicals’ status as quintessentially mixed media that place unrelated texts, images, and reports into different relations of coming before or after. On the other hand, serial forms model coordinated, conjunctive relationships of different parts in a series through structures of regular and irregular periodicity, continuation, and republication. The periodic return of the same journal or the continuation of the same story or report across multiple issues can be understood as techniques of marking time that establish continuity and duration. Taken together, disjunctive and conjunctive format conditions and the genre conventions that rely on them give readers templates for observing order as well as disorder, permanence as well as impermanence.

Miscellaneity, Archival Storage, and Sequential Viewing

It is common for scholars to use miscellaneity as a shorthand for periodicals’ “nonlinear assemblage of parcels of text.”⁶⁶ As James Mussell puts it, miscellaneity and seriality are “the means through which readers engage with newspapers and periodicals.”⁶⁷ As a technical term of periodical studies, “miscellaneity” is based in the long-standing literary genre and format convention of the miscellany, with roots in early modern notions of the florilegium and eighteenth-century moral-satirical traditions. This tradition flourished in eighteenth-century moral weeklies (the so-called moralische Wochenschriften) and in related anthology and pocketbook formats, all of which presented readers with a deliberately varied mixture of edifying and entertaining material. “Miscellany” (Miscelle) can be the title of a specific rubric in a given journal, but it can also be a journal or anthology’s title or guiding principle. The interest in miscellaneous material remains constant into the nineteenth century, but the principle of miscellaneity takes on new cultural authority around 1800, as expanded reading audiences grow ever more eager for ever more material. Indeed, in a piece commissioned for the inaugural issue of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, Jean Paul states that miscellaneity is the essence not merely of the Morgenblatt or of all periodicals more broadly but of the age itself.

The miscellany is a quintessential small form, and formats that assemble smaller forms mirror the reading practices of audiences awash in printed matter. As propagators of miscellaneous contents, authors and editors function as much as compilers and collectors as genial creators of original content.⁶⁸ Miscellaneity also involves techniques of temporal juxtaposition. Dated in different ways and containing texts written by different authors, nineteenth-century journals place different times into relation and promote miscellaneous styles of reading.⁶⁹ Readers are required to move from one text’s or image’s context and presuppositions to another at varying speeds and rhythms, aided by various format and typographic conventions that facilitate transitions.⁷⁰ Though all print entails a strong tendency to nonlinearity, periodicals and other serial texts make nonlinear encounters possible in a particularly salient way.⁷¹ The dual dynamic of these articles’ internal (diegetic, if you will) depictions of distinct frames of time, on the one hand, and of readers moving (extradiegetically) through an open-ended sequence of articles, on the other, is always at play. The “under the line” feuilleton section of newspapers, developed in the 1790s, comes to function as a key motor for topical and temporal juxtaposition, working in tandem with other sorts of regular supplements and addenda. Furthermore, miscellaneous cultural journalism undergoes a process of temporalization during this period. In mid-eighteenth-century moral weeklies, miscellaneous modes commonly negotiated stock virtues and vices from the religious and humanistic tradition with equal parts didacticism and satire. As miscellaneous formats come to function as a privileged mode of reporting from revolution-era European capitals, they become increasingly urgent and time specific. This can be seen in the publisher Cotta’s twin journals, titled Englische Miszellen (English miscellanies) and Französische Miszellen (French miscellanies) (1803–1806), which he would combine in founding the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände. Parts I and II of Writing Time explore this cultural journalism and its temporalization of the miscellany.

The understanding of journals as sites of archival storage—a key topic in recent book and media history—works hand in hand with miscellaneity. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and up to the present day), it has been common to name journals Archive, Magazine, Library, or Museum, thus envisioning periodicals as repositories for differently timed, often expired, yet reactualizable items, not unlike the reading rooms and lending libraries in which they were commonly read. As archives, journals can be more or less organized, more “museum” than “magazine,” and they rely on various techniques of creating rubrics and indexing to manage information overload. Journals’ statuses as small or larger archives apply both to individual issues and to the collecting and binding together of a yearly set of issues, a practice intended by many editors, as evidenced by many journals’ continuous pagination.⁷² Journals and other serial forms are thus analogous to other quintessentially nineteenth-century sites of collection and preservation: the libraries, museums, and exhibitions that Jürgen Osterhammel calls the era’s “memory strongholds, treasures of knowledge, and storage media.”⁷³ However, in contrast to more stable archives, the close connection of journals to current events lend their archival quality a certain precarity.⁷⁴

The status of cultural journals as literal and figural archives has clear temporal ramifications, as readers are called upon to negotiate a variety of coexisting frames of time. Radical temporal heterogeneity—what Michel Foucault calls “heterochronia”⁷⁵—is just one option for journals, with some conveying an aspiration to a panoramic historical or geographical overview, as expressed in the titles of mid-nineteenth-century German journals such as Panorama (Panorama), Über Land und Meer (Across land and sea), or Das Universum (The universe). It is also common for authors and editors to state that the jumbled contents of their writings are intended for future readers, in particular readers in possession of the proper historical overview, to sort out, as we saw in the quote from Bertuch and Böttiger (see note 50). Directing archival material toward future readers—“future historians”—casts their journal as an archive that makes reencounter possible. Journals thus partake of a certain kind of permanence despite their common association with impermanence.⁷⁶ Serial print shares this dynamic with a range of other storage media, including web-based digital media. The ability to rediscover the currency of old materials bases the experience of the new as much in repetition and nonsimultaneity as in real-time diachronic unfolding and enables untimely afterlives of now-expired representations of the present.

Rubrics that foreground sequential viewing likewise facilitate the encounter with serialized forms. A set of largely synonymous terms casts the small forms of journals and anthologies in expressly visual terms; these include “tableau,” “sketch,” “physiognomy,” “portrait,” piece (Stück) and counterpiece (Gegenstück), “panorama,” “travel” or “fleeting images” (flüchtige Bilder), “images of time” (Zeitbilder), and more. The late eighteenth century witnesses a rise in small forms that present flexible, mosaic-like snapshots of modern life, a conceit well suited for serial publication, as periodicals offer readers partial “views” of fleeting moments and promise that more will come. Such forms lend themselves to repetitive proliferation and continuation, as ongoing, serialized observation is seen as necessary to understanding a changing world. It is in this context that contemporaries register a sense of multiple images rushing or passing by (Bilderflut). The metaphor of flow has long been associated with tropes of transience and is a central part of the nineteenth-century engagement with time and the dynamic movement of the urban landscape. This metaphor maps onto the long-standing Heraclitean figure of time as a diachronic stream (which Blumenberg has called an absolute metaphor for time and historicity⁷⁷), but like the miscellany and the archive, flow also can evoke disjunctive structures of syncrisis (the comparison of opposites) and rearrangement, as in conceits of the journal as “museum” or “gallery” of “images.” The genre conceit of the tableau is especially important for generating a sense of sequential viewing. Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s multivolume Le Tableau de Paris (The tableau of Paris) (1781–1788) pioneers a style of short vignettes about urban life and the changing city; in calling these sketches tableaus, he relies on metaphors of visualization and theatrical scenery. His work has a large influence on German cultural journalism—part I of this book foregrounds the tableau mouvant—and the genre rubric of the urban sketch proves to be an extremely malleable literary and historiographical form.

The notion that serial print enables visual observation profits from the reciprocity between literary writing and the visual arts, but it is also based in the important fact that so many journals and anthologies include images. Prior to the rise of illustrated periodicals in the 1830s, most journals place images at the end of individual issues, and illustrations and elaborate title vignettes are key attractions of literary Taschenbücher. Printed images help ground a “pedagogy of observation” (as Vance Byrd terms it), as readers are tasked with negotiating a variety of images and literary visualizations.⁷⁸ Plates depicting fashions in clothing and interior design are a key part of the broader realm of cultural entertainment, serving as markers of moral and cultural standing. These images document new fashions and luxury products and help readers visualize historical differences and change over time. Caricatures, political propaganda, and time-specific “image journalism” all become staples of serial print in the revolutionary era, as publishers embrace techniques of image production that are less time-consuming than painting or engraving, which includes etching and, later, lithography.⁷⁹ Though much of the time frame I address in this book predates the technological advances that would enable the late nineteenth-century illustrated press, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness a significant expansion of the market for printed images both as literary illustrations and as political and cultural catalysts in their own right. The visual imaginary of the period thus calls out for analytical tools that are not predicated on absorption in single works and instead invites a focus on how techniques of connecting, contrasting, and transitioning amid a profusion of different images help readers process the “flood.”

A sense of being overwhelmed by images leads to the search for techniques of selecting certain ones out of the ephemeral flow and channeling them into forms of repetition and recurrence. Take the example of the writer, journal editor, and antiquarian Karl Philipp Moritz, who laments the chaos of modern life, where the pace of images rushing by rivals that of time’s passing: “In the flight of time, it is all we can do just to capture the outlines of the images that rush pass us.”⁸⁰ The desire to find points of normative orientation in a crowded media landscape goes hand in hand with an appreciation of printed images as consumer items to be preserved. Selecting images from the flow can be a process of the figural imagination, but it also is a strategy of lending value to specific print products intended to make a visual impression on consumers. Printed images are an important part of the discourse of luxury around 1800, and classicizing formal and stylistic conventions are often used to establish value. Part I of this book explores questions of neoclassicism and print luxury under the sign of serial form; like the Wedgwood vases and sculpture reproductions so popular at the time, certain printed images are meant to instantiate classicizing norms of beauty, yet they are also produced en masse through serial repetition.

Selecting and preserving texts or images is very much a gesture of consolidating the flow of data into clearly identifiable works. But as soon as one starts to consider works as part of a series, the idea of the work’s singularity appears suspect.⁸¹ Throughout Writing Time, I return to how the disjunctive features of serial forms—based in writers’ and readers’ propensities to juxtapose heterogeneous material—challenge emphatic concepts of the individual work. In addition to being an era of expanding serial culture, the early and mid-nineteenth century sees the emergence of idealist aesthetics of the autonomous work. The idea of the work as an organic totality dates back to antiquity but also finds new expression in the aesthetics of Moritz, Goethe, Hegel, and the Romantics. Moreover, scholars have tracked the rise of this aesthetics of autonomy to the shifting copyright laws and the expansion of the literary marketplace around 1800, which leads authors to develop strategies of distinguishing certain kinds of literary works from the broader flow of print and paper. It is in this context that serial formats are commonly disparaged for lacking coherence (Zusammenhang) and being merely pieced together (zusammengestückelt). Throughout Writing Time, I show how serial print’s tendency to take form in loosely coordinated assemblages and unbound continuations serves as an uncanny other to the ideal of coherence and unity of parts that come to be asserted ever more emphatically in this period.

Periodicity, Continuation, Irregular Periodicity, and Republication

Along with producing disjunctive textual and visual constellations, serial formats likewise facilitate the conjunction of similar entities. Periodicity is an essential feature of the print landscape and a defining characteristic of periodicals, for it sets in motion patterns of similar items following each other at varying paces.⁸² Rhythms of production, consumption, and distribution structured the systems of recurring book fairs and postal networks, the latter being the dominant mode of delivering journals and newspapers to readers well into the nineteenth century.⁸³ Periodic recurrence generates the expectation that more will come at a predictable pace and pattern, organizing the time of the new and of the pause between issues. Periodicity can thus inform a successive, additive sense of time, in which the release of each installment makes the previous one out of date. From the moment the periodical press emerged in the seventeenth century, it was common to calibrate journals’ periodicities with readers’ daily routines and seasonal turning points. The explicitly temporal connotations of “Journal” or Zeitschrift suggest the diaristic recording of time, and daily periodicity is referenced in titles such as Morgen- or Abendblatt. Patterns of cyclical recurrence are evoked by periodical titles such as Calendar, Almanac, Yearbook, and Zodiac, as well as titles based on the seasons, like Schiller’s Horen, which references the Greek goddesses of time and the seasons. The seasonal recurrence of trade fairs and other commercial patterns likewise shapes a sense of newness and repetition, particularly in the fashion world, which is predicated on the rapid succession of different trends. In addition, the church calendar plays a central role in people’s lives, structuring certain key rhythms of reading and writing, and serves as the backdrop for journals’ recurring discussions of carnival and other popular festivities. Periodicities of varying sorts create what we might call, with Kubler, related “families of shapes of time.”⁸⁴

Periodicity is at the heart of the promise of continuation: the sense that another issue or installment is to come. Of course, articles, novellas, poems, and individual journals inevitably end, but even when a story or correspondence report concludes or when a journal closes shop, there is always more textual material to consume, other papers to read (at least until newspapers cease to exist). There is a certain fragility to shapes of time based on unbound continuation—the awareness that the sea of print will continue to ebb and flow—but there is also something reassuring. As with periodicity, patterns of continuation can evoke both diachronic movement—as “irresistible, forward moving stor[ies] in a linear shape”⁸⁵—and cyclical structures of repetition, showing basic similarities between these shapes of time.⁸⁶ Structures of daily, monthly, or yearly repetition and continuation take on particular relevance in the wake of the French Revolution, which is paradoxically cast both as a break with the old and as an inaugural moment for new traditions, with revolutionaries going so far as to propose that the revolution redefines the way time is measured. Revolutionary cultural politics is wont to overlay the time of national popular life with the time of print publication. In part I I explore how representations of Roman carnival coexist with reports on revolutionary festivities in the cultural journals of the 1790s, with Goethe and other German writers turning to carnival’s relative permanence as an anchor for finding continuity and structure in chaotic times. Representations of the recurrence of antiquity into the present and future share an interest with revolutionary cultural politics in classicizing shapes of time, but, as we will see, journal-based depictions of such festivals also serve as sites of critical observation, with month-to-month or year-to-year commentary on festival culture subjecting new cultural forms to scrutiny. Bringing political, social, and cultural life into resonance with the media times of print can complicate models of predictable repetition.

Irregular periodicity represents a particular challenge to patterns of regular, quasinatural recurrence. Many of the literary experiments under examination throughout this book partake of the irregularity and temporal “unruliness” of nineteenth-century serial forms.⁸⁷ To be sure, this is an epoch of the regularization and mechanization of print, as Müller-Sievers has shown in his study of the rotary press, with time taking on regularized, cyclical, and indeed cylindrical shapes.⁸⁸ Rationalization and mechanization likewise condition the emergence of cinematic time.⁸⁹ At the same time, though, patterns of irregular temporal unfolding proliferate in the nineteenth century, including in the practice of publishing a given journal or an open-ended works edition in installments not yet on a regularized, preset schedule (what in German is referred to as zwanglose Hefte). Anthology collections frequently appear in serialized installments, yet their periodicity is often not predetermined or on track. The irregular appearance of similar items in a series reveals where the time of print runs on a schedule that differs from the predictable patterns of seasonal, diachronic time or commercial life. Irregular periodicity is just one example of how media rather than natural pregivens model expectations toward the future.⁹⁰

Republication is a special case of irregular periodicity. It is common for newspapers and journals to cut and paste copy from other periodicals and for more established writers to try to profit from the same text being published multiple times if they can get out ahead of the often-inevitable pirated reprints. The republication of texts by established writers usually proceeds from a multiauthor journal version (sometimes referred to as prepublication or Vorabdruck) to a single-author anthology or works edition. It is easy to forget that such format migration is a standard feature of the nineteenth century, not least because twentieth-century critical editions often neglect publication contexts, a process of “stripping, disciplining and institutionaliz[ing]” texts, as Laurel Brake puts it.⁹¹ Evaluating the format migrations characteristic of the period involves taking a skeptical glance at the sometimes-spurious additions of subsequent critical editions. Either way, it is a deliberate philological choice to deal with journal versions or later single-author anthologies.⁹² To be sure, republication in book form was and is part and parcel of the business of print. Nineteenth-century authors and publishers capitalize on the same writings multiple times, and republication helps writers evade the censors who police journals and newspapers more strictly. But, in the hands of certain writers, republication also establishes patterns of temporal unfolding. Jean Paul, for example, invests the typically pejorative terms prepublication (Vorabdruck) and pirated reprinting (Nachdruck) with poetic and historiographical significance, and I seek to visualize the effects of republication in chapters 4 and 5 (see figure 4.1). The activity of marking different versions, whether performed by authors and publishers or by subsequent readers, emphasizes each version’s place in a series of distinct publication events, and writers draw attention to this kind of medial and historical eventfulness in promoting their works. Imprinting multiple dates on the same text models how texts and images can be rediscovered and reactualized at different times. Writers calibrate patterns of history with the time of publication and republication, lending new meanings to the saying that “history repeats itself.”

Republication is also reconstellation, as the migration of texts from one more-or-less miscellaneous repository to another places them in new textual environments. At first glance, format migration from journal to book and/or works editions would seem to reinforce the book-centric logic and canonical standing of the individual work, a logic commonly supported by works editions and the subsequent organization of critical-scholarly editions according to a sense of “complete,” “bound” seriality. As my case studies show, however, the temporal patterns established by republication do not always necessarily elide the unruly temporalities of the periodical. Though my studies are largely organized around individual author figures, I explore ways in which these figures’ activities in republishing and envisioning the open-ended future rediscovery of their works are not primarily tied to notions of completeness, wholeness, or organic unity. Serial formats prompt us to reconsider or at least expand our concept of authorship. Republication is also an interesting test case for the fragility of certain shapes of time, for placing different versions of the same or similar texts into a series is a choice that only some readers make. Authorial control and intention can be asserted through republication and recirculation, yet works can be dissociated from an author’s life and oeuvre through the same processes, as texts float back into the sea of print to be reissued, reencountered, and rearchived.

Just as it is a feature of author-based literary history to isolate and philologically secure authoritative versions of individual texts, it is a feature of periodical studies to look more closely at textual environments and format migration. Literary history faces the challenge of discerning the relationships between various kinds of more and less interrelated texts. This is a challenge, I would propose, of discerning different kinds of retrospective shapes of time, and it is one that must be constantly renegotiated by new generations of scholars. Serial forms offer us concrete tools for addressing these historiographical challenges and for crafting new kinds of literary-historical narratives guided by the material features of the traditions and historical contexts in question. If literary history is concerned with different afterlives of literary and cultural objects, serial print offers us important coordinates through which to orient ourselves when facing the sea of print.

***Tableaux mouvants, Miscellanies of Time, and Zeitgeschichten***

The three parts of my book are organized around specific formal and generic conceits—the tableau, the miscellany, and the contemporary history (Zeitgeschichte)—and around adept practitioners of serial literature in each of these categories. In part I, I look at how fashion and cultural journals of the 1780s and 1790s are predicated on notions of sequential viewing, focusing on Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden and London und Paris, two pioneers of cultural journalism in the period. Bertuch’s journals deliberately adapt Mercier’s ethnographic sketches of urban life, commerce, and fashion, or tableaus. Bertuch is certainly not alone in German letters in embracing the tableau as a formal conceit, but he is a forerunner in aggressively including images in his journals. Bertuch’s journals work with shapes of time characteristic of the discourses and businesses of fashion and print, associating both with the ever-changing generation of the new and with historical reemergence. Chapter 1 sketches the organizing conceptual and format conditions of Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden and his response to the “new time” of the French Revolution. I explore how Bertuch, his coeditors, and their correspondents attempt to chronicle the present and identify patterns of historical duration at work. I also explore the journal’s prominent use of fashion plates as part of its broader engagement with the genre conventions of the tableau. Fashion imagery plays a central role in the journal’s representation of luxury, but it is also an important part of the journal’s aspiration to be itself a form of print luxury. Chapter 2 examines Goethe’s representation of the Roman carnival, which was published in the Journal des Luxus und der Moden and accompanied by a series of images that strongly recall the journal’s fashion plates. I read Goethe’s piece against the backdrop of reporting on features of postrevolutionary popular life characteristic of Bertuch’s and his coeditors’ cultural journalism. The multiple versions of Goethe’s piece in luxury book, journal, and works editions represent a compelling case of how different print formats shape the awareness of time. Chapter 3 turns to the place of caricature in Bertuch’s journals and these journals’ critique of the cultural politics of the Napoleonic era. Here I look at caricature as both a type of printed image and, more broadly, a mode of cultural journalism. Caricature mobilizes a variety of shapes of time, including fleeting public interest and the subversion of self-serious claims to monumental timelessness. Although associated with the history of ancient satire and classicizing line drawing, caricature diminishes neoclassical forms. Exploring Bertuch’s journals’ satirical treatment of recurring popular festivities, I show how his journals remain skeptical of the historical vision of revolutionary cultural politics, even while helping readers orient themselves historically.

In part II, I look at the miscellany, a form that epitomizes the heterogeneous appearance of the literary journal. In particular, I focus on Jean Paul’s embrace of miscellaneity as an organizing principle of his works and as an inroad to reflections on time. Jean Paul is a central figure in this book who operates at the intersection of periodical literature and more book-centered, single-author modes of writing. In Jean Paul’s hands, the convention of juxtaposing unrelated textual units becomes a way to model temporal heterogeneity. At the same time, he is an outlier vis-à-vis the nascent philosophy of history, incessantly reminding readers of the transience of human affairs. Chapter 4 looks at how he responds to the chaos of Napoleonic occupation; the fundamental question of this chapter is how miscellaneous, occasional writings can comment on the present day and historicize it in productive ways. Jean Paul seeks to relativize the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars, adopting a future vantage point from which to cast present suffering as fleeting. In envisioning possible futures, he also embraces logics of publication and republication, playfully staging the reencounter with past works. Chapter 5 turns from politics to authorial persona and autobiography, examining how Jean Paul imagines the completion of his oeuvre. The works edition is a key place where the time of writing and the time of life (Lebenszeit) are intertwined. The fundamental question of this chapter is how an utterly miscellaneous body of work can come to an end. As I show, Jean Paul’s reflections on the end of his life and the end of his works actually serve as a way of imagining serial continuation, as he filters his approach to cultural permanence through the precarious temporalities of the small, miscellaneous literary work, or Werkchen. In this context, I compare Jean Paul’s and Goethe’s approaches to their collected works editions. Jean Paul ironizes the process of authorial canonization and monumentalization when he presents readers with a body of miscellaneous works in a state of incessant continuation, bringing the finitude of the author as living person into an ambivalent relationship to an ever-growing body of work. In effect, Jean Paul makes the challenge of encountering an unmanageable sea of print into a condition of possibility for his works edition.

In part III I explore Börne’s and Heine’s commentaries and correspondence reports from Paris in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s as experiments in writing contemporary history. First publishing many of these writings in newspapers and journals, Börne and Heine cull the larger trends of the times from what appear to be insignificant, fleeting occurrences. This interpretive strategy takes on additional importance when both authors rework their journal articles into book form. Both authors hope that their serialized histories of the present and recent past can provide continued insight into the past, present, and future. Paradoxically, for Börne and Heine, now out-of-date accounts of forgotten events take on new kinds of urgency through republication and encourage readers to identify previously unseen structures of duration over time, including those that might intimate the coming of future revolutions on the basis of the failures of 1789 or 1830. Questions of republication figure prominently in my exploration of works editions written under the sign of ephemeral print forms, as Börne and Heine experiment with open-ended, ongoing editions that consist of writings for periodicals and that model different historiographical afterlives. Chapter 6 focuses on Börne’s editorial projects, his Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris) (1832–1834), and his reflections on print format, historical time, and the future of the revolution. Chapter 7 explores Heine’s two most important attempts at serial history writing in Französische Zustände (Conditions in France) (1833) and Lutezia (1854), including his juxtaposition of historical reflections and journalistic reportage, his critique of academic historians of the revolution, and his engagement with portraiture and caricature. Reconsidering Heine’s and Börne’s history writing through the question of seriality sheds new light on how they construe an awareness of historical time on the basis of textual and medial formats rather than on the basis of a philosophical-historical telos.

The book’s epilogue returns to questions of the historiographical stakes of foregrounding serial literature, considering the timely as well as untimely afterlives of serial forms.

1. Ludwig Börne, “Einleitung,” Die Wage, Eine Zeitschrift für Bürgerleben, Wissenschaft und Kunst 1 (1818): 1.
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 8.
3. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9.
4. Gerhart von Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane: ängstliche Moderne. Über das Imaginäre (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2014), 345.
5. See Joachim Kirchner, Das deutsche Zeitschriftenwesen. Seine Geschichte und seine Probleme, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1958), 267.
6. As Thomas Carlyle puts it in 1831, “Literature, Printed Thought is the molten sea and wonder-bearing Chaos, into which mind after mind casts forth its opinion, its feeling to be molten into the general mass, and to work there.” Thomas Carlyle, “Review of William Taylor, Historic Survey of German Poetry,” Edinburgh Review 53, no. 105 (1831): 179-180.
7. James Wald, “Periodicals and Periodicity,” in Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Jonathan Rose and Simon Eliot (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 424.
8 . Mark W. Turner, “The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and in the Digital Age),” in Serialization in Popular Culture, ed. Thijs van den Berg and Rob Allen (London: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 12.
9 . Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2006 [1963]), 43.
10. Heinrich Heine to Gustav Kolb, November 11, 1828. HSA, 20, 350.
11. “Das Buch, wie wir es zu kennen glauben, hat in der Epoche, die rückblickend als geistesgeschichtliche Großepoche des Buchs verstanden wird, so gar nicht existiert.” Carlos Spoerhase, Das Format der Literatur: Praktiken materieller Textualität zwischen 1740 und 1830 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018), 45.
12. Frank Kelleter, “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality,” in Media of Serial Narrative, ed. Frank Kelleter (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017), 15.
13. See Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
14. Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), xv.
15. See Helge Jordheim, “ ‘Unzählbar viele Zeiten.’ Die Sattelzeit im Spiegel der Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,” in Begriffene Geschichte. Beiträge zum Werk Reinhart Kosellecks, ed. Hans Joas and Peter Vogt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011), 449–80. François Hartog, for example, describes this period in terms of the confrontation between historiographical regimes while other historians talk of the “oscillation” (Christopher Clark) between different conceptions of historical time or of modernity’s characteristic “pluritemporality” (Achim Landwehr). See François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Christopher Clark, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Achim Landwehr, Geburt der Gegenwart. Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2014).
16. Dirk Göttsche, “Challenging Time(s): Memory, Politics, and the Philosophy of Time in Jean Paul’s Quintus Fixlein,” in (Re-)Writing the Radical: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Cultural Transfer in 1790s Germany, Britain, and France, ed. Maike Oergel (New York: De Gruyter, 2012), 221.
17. Wolf Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hanser, 1976), 19.
18. Clark, Time and Power, 4.
19. Benedict Anderson, “Nationalism, Identity, and the Logic of Seriality,” in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 34.
20. Anderson, “Nationalism, Identity, and the Logic,” 29.
21. On the aesthetics of narrative cycles and their relation to seriality, see Christine Mielke, Zyklisch-serielle Narration: Erzähltes Erzählen von 1001 Nacht bis zur TV-Serie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006).
22. See Nicola Kaminski, Nora Ramtke, and Carsten Zelle, “Zeitschriftenliteratur/Fortsetzungsliteratur: Problemaufriß,” in Zeitschriftenliteratur/Fortsetzungsliteratur, ed. Nicola Kaminski, Nora Ramtke, and Carsten Zelle (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2014), 15.
23. See Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
24. See Angela Esterhammer, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity: 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
25. See Patricia Mainardi, Another World: Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Print Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Claudia Stockinger, An den Ursprüngen populärer Serialität: Das Familienblatt “Die Gartenlaube” (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018); and Lynne Tatlock, “The Afterlife of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction and the German Imaginary: The Illustrated Collected Novels of E. Marlitt, W. Heimburg, and E. Werner,” in Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 118–53.
26. See Christine Blättler, “Überlegungen zu Serialität als ästhetischem Begriff,” Weimarer Beiträge 49, no. 4 (2003): 504–5.
27. On the concept of medial realism, see Daniela Gretz, ed., Medialer Realismus (Freiburg: Rombach, 2011).
28. See Umberto Eco, “Interpreting Serials,” in The Limits of Interpretation (Indiana University Press, 1990), 83–100. See also recently Vincent Fröhlich, Der Cliffhanger und die serielle Narration. Analyse einer transmedialen Erzähltechnik (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015).
29. On Kracauer’s rediscovery of the operetta and on nineteenth-century small forms more broadly, see Ethel Matala de Mazza, Der populäre Pakt: Verhandlungen der Moderne zwischen Operette und Feuilleton (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2018).
30. Though it should not lead us to ignore the period’s many important “scenes” of writing by hand. See Rüdiger Campe, “Writing; The Scene of Writing,” MLN 136, no. 5 (2021): 971–83.
31. See Albrecht Koschorke, Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999); Ian McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making, 1790s–1820s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). For recent work on writing’s place in more general media history, see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
32. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 3.
33. Sibylle Krämer, “The Cultural Techniques of Time Axis Manipulation: On Friedrich Kittler’s Conception of Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 23, nos. 7–8 (2006): 96.
34. See Friedrich A. Kittler, “Die Laterna magica der Literatur: Schillers und Hoffmanns Medienstrategien,” Athenäum 4 (1994): 219–37.
35. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962).
36. On recent scholarship that has adapted Kubler’s contributions to theorizing seriality, see Simon Rothöhler, Theorien der Serie zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2020), 92–101.
37. Siegfried Kracauer, “Time and History,” History and Theory 6, no. 6 (1966): 67–68.
38. Kracauer, “Time and History,” 69.
39. On assemblages of component parts leading to temporal figures, see Lucian Hölscher, Zeitgärten. Zeitfiguren in der Geschichte der Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020), 29.
40. See Noah Heringman, Deep Time: A Literary History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023). On seriality’s role in nineteenth-century science, see Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer, and Jim Secord, “Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century,” History of Science 48, nos. 3–4 (2010): 251–80. On seriality’s role in addressing epistemic uncertainty, see Malika Maskarinec, “Introduction,” in Truth in Serial Form: Serial Formats and the Form of the Series (1850–1930), ed. Malika Maskarinec (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023).
41. See Joachim Krausse, “Ephemer,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, ed. Karlheinz Barck et al., vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), 242.
42. As Koerner puts it, human activities are represented as “ongoing in the always present, and therefore permanently timeless, here and now,” “suspended between the beginning and the end but irredeemably ahistorical.” Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Breugel: From Enemy Painting to Everday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 186.
43. Niklas Luhmann, “Temporalisierung von Komplexität: Zur Semantik neuzeitlicher Zeitbegriffe,” in Gesellschaftsstrukur und Semantik, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 257.
44. Elena Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden: Paradoxien der Mode, trans. Allesandra Corti (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004).
45. Hans Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986).
46. On fashion journalism, see Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden, 107; on periodicals as catalysts of the temporalization of the natural sciences, see Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte, 103.
47. See Wolfgang Thierse, “ ‘Das Ganze aber ist das, was Anfang, Mitte und Ende hat.’ Problemgeschichtliche Beobachtungen zur Geschichte des Werkbegriffs,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Studien zu einem historischen Wörterbuch, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Martin Fontius, and Wolfgang Thierse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990), 378–414.
48. On development as a nineteenth-century temporal figure, see most recently Hölscher, Zeitgärten, 234–43. On the trope of narrative disentanglement, see Sabine Mainberger, Die Kunst des Aufzählens. Elemente zu einer Poetik des Enumerativen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003), 9.
49. Kubler describes cultural activity as “cultural bundles consisting of variegated fibrous lengths of happening, mostly long, and many brief.” Kubler, The Shape of Time, 111.
50. Friedrich Justin Bertuch and Karl August Böttiger, “Plan und Ankündigung,” London und Paris 1, no. 1 (1798): 4, 3.
51. Graevenitz, Theodor Fontane: ängstliche Moderne, 703.
52. As Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund argue, “the serial embodied a vision, a perspective on stories about life, intrinsic to Victorian culture.” Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 12. See also Kelleter’s discussion of “neo-vitalist” poststructuralist and posthumanist approaches to popular seriality that portray seriality as a “fundamental life force of culture.” Kelleter, “Five Ways of Looking,” 11.
53. Carl Gelderloos, Biological Modernism: The New Human in Weimar Culture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 67.
54. Helmut Müller-Sievers, “Kinematik des Erzählens: Zum Stand der amerikanischen Fernsehserie,” Merkur 64, no. 794 (2015): 29.
55. Müller-Sievers, “Kinematik des Erzählens,” 29.
56. John Rieder pursues a similar line of thought in the context of the genre system of science fiction: “Seriality, one could say, constructs a set of continuities in the generic world that simultaneously accentuate its discontinuity from other domains of experience. It establishes a periodicity that punctuates the other routines and duties of the mass audience by separating itself from them and asserting a life, or at least a temporality, of its own. Thus the topic of seriality leads from repetition to collective fantasy, on the one hand, and to the temporal rhythms of mass culture, on the other.” John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 57.
57. The work of Wolfgang Ernst, who tells a story of how the microtemporalities of electric and electronic media withhold themselves from human perception, is also instructive here. Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
58. On shifts in concepts of Zeitgeschichte, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Constancy and Change of All Contemporary Histories. Conceptual-Historical Notes,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 100–117.
59. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, vol. 12 of Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 14.
60. Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 8.
61. See Koselleck, “Sediments of Time.”
62. Reinhart Koselleck, “Einleitung,” in Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 9–19, 9. On Koselleck’s theory of historical times, see especially Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 151–71; and John Zammito, “Koselleck’s Philosophy of Historical Time(s) and the Practice of History,” History and Theory 43, no. 1 (2004): 124–35.
63. In a way, Koselleck’s approach to Goethe is in line with other recent revaluations of Goethe’s protean oeuvre; see most recently Michael Bies and Wolfgang Hottner, “(Ist fortzusetzen.)” Anschlüsse, Fortführungen und Enden in Goethes späten Werken (Freiburg: Rombach, 2024).
64. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Goethe’s Untimely History,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 60–78. For a more extended version of my discussion here of Koselleck’s view of Goethe, see Sean Franzel, “Koselleck’s Timely Goethe?” Goethe Yearbook 26 (2019): 283–99.
65. As in Hayden White’s account of the nineteenth-century historical imagination; see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
66. Wald, “Periodicals and Periodicity,” 422.
67. James Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 50.
68. On nineteenth-century adaptations of techniques of compiling, see Petra S. McGillen, The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).
69. See Daniela Gretz, Marcus Krause, and Nicolas Pethes, ed., Reading Miscellanies—Miscellaneous Readings (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2022).
70. On the transitional function of the feuilleton, see Gustav Frank and Stefan Scherer, “Zeit-Texte. Zur Funktionsgeschichte und zum generischen Ort des Feuilletons,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 22, no. 3 (2012): 524–39.
71. See John Durham Peters’s critique of Lev Manovich’s widely discussed distinction between “narrative,” and hence linear, print media and nonlinear, “database” digital media; Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 290.
72. See Gustav Frank, Madleen Podewski, and Stefan Scherer, “Kultur—Zeit—Schrift. Literatur- und Kulturzeitschriften als “kleine Archive,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 34 (2009): 1–45.
73. Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2011), 31.
74. As Scherer and Stockinger put it, the “tension between currentness … and stabilization, order, and archivization” is always at play. Stefan Scherer and Claudia Stockinger, “Archive in Serie. Kulturzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Archiv/Fiktionen. Verfahren des Archivierens in Kultur und Literatur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes (Freiburg: Rombach, 2016), 253–276, 256.
75. See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27, 26.
76. As Richard Taws reminds us, “the ‘ephemeral’ names both that which is fleeting and that which remains, the object to be destroyed, but also the mass-reproduced, collected, and preserved.” Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2013), 168.
77. Hans Blumenberg, Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge, ed. Ulrich von Bülow and Dorit Krusche (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2012), 103.
78. See Vance Byrd, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017).
79. On the concept of “image journalism,” see Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France (London: Reaktion, 2008).
80. Karl Philipp Moritz, Anthousa, oder Roms Alterthümer. Ein Buch für die Menschheit (Berlin: Maurer, 1791), 6.
81. “Looking back, it is not the notion of seriality [das Serielle] that seems paradoxical, but rather the idea that one could observe something as singular as existing in itself apart from any plurality.” Elisabeth Bronfen, Christiane Frey, and David Martyn, “Vorwort,” in Noch einmal Anders. Zu einer Poetik des Seriellen, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen, Christiane Frey, and David Martyn (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2016), 9–10.
82. “The essence of periodicals is periodicity.” Wald, “Periodicals and Periodicity,” 422.
83. See Will Slauter, “Periodicals and the Commercialization of Information in the Early Modern Era,” in Information: A Historical Companion, ed. Ann Blair et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 128–50.
84. Kubler, The Shape of Time, 91.
85. Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, 73.
86. As Koselleck argues, cyclicality, too, is based in a conception of linear direction: “Cyclical movement is a line directed back into itself.” Reinhart Koselleck, “Sediments of Time,” in Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. and ed. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 3–4.
87. As Turner argues, “we ought to celebrate the serial’s unruliness and explore further its stuttering, uncertain, nonlinear and often unpredictable qualities.” Turner, “The Unruliness of Serials,” 20.
88. See Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder.
89. See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
90. Irregular publication patterns cultivate “reader experiences with nonlinearity, simultaneity, continguity and incoherence.” David Brehm et al., Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815 oder Chronopoetik des ‘Unregelmäßigen (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2022), xiii.
91. Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (London: Palgrave, 2001), 29.
92. Andreas Huyssen addresses this point, for example, in his choice to base his analysis of the mediality of the modernist miniature on anthology editions rather than on the versions in newspaper feuilletons. Andreas Huyssen, Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 300n9.

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