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Hayward, Jennifer. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1997. 
Added by: joachim (24/06/2013, 12:30)   
Resource type: Book
Language: en: English
ID no. (ISBN etc.): 0-8131-2025-X
BibTeX citation key: Hayward1997
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Categories: General
Keywords: "Terry and the Pirates", Caniff. Milton, Comic strip, Ethnicity, Seriality, USA
Creators: Hayward
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky (Lexington)
Views: 15/512
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Abstract
“To be continued …” Whether these words fall at a season-ending episode of Star Trek or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. Jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre – one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, comics, and advertisements of the twentieth century, serials are loosely linked by what may be called “family resemblances.” These traits include intertwined subplots, diverse casts of characters, dramatic plot reversals, suspense, an such narrative devices as long-lost family members and evil twins. Hayward chooses four texts to represent the evolution of serial fiction as a genre and to analyze the peculiar draw that serials have upon their audiences: Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, Milton Canif’s comic strip Terry and the Pirates, and the soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live. Hayward argues that serial audiences have developed active strategies of consumption, such as collaborative reading and attempts to shape the production process. In this way fans have forced serial producers to acknowledge the power of the audience.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments (ix)

Introduction (1)

1. Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial (21)
Nineteenth-Century Readers of Serial Fiction (29)
Case Study: Our Mutual Friend (41)
Reviewers as Readers (52)
“There was no such thing as I”: The Narrative Preoccupations of Serial Fiction (71)

2. Terry’s Expert Readers: The Rise of the Continuity Comic (84)
“Streamline your mind”: Comic Strip Production in the Age of Ford and Taylor (88)
Case Study: Terry and the Pirates (95)
Active Readers and Comic Agendas (105)
Comic Ideologies: Pinup Girls and “Screwy Chinese” (116)
The Decline of the Serial Strip (128)

3. The Future of the Serial Form (135)
Audiences and Soap Opera Production (144)
Knowledge and Power: Soap Narrative Strategies (151)
Audiences and Power (163)
Case Study: Redeeming the Rapist (174)
Humor, Irony, and Self-Reflexivity (185)
Tune In Tomorrow (189)

Notes (197)
Bibliography (207)
Index (216)


Added by: joachim  Last edited by: joachim
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