The Start of a New Chapter: Serialization and the 19th-Century Novel

"The Start of a New Chapter": Serialization and the 19th-Century Novel
Truxaw, Ellen, Stanford University, ellen.truxaw@gmail.com
Although there have been numerous efforts to theorize the novel, little work exists on the chapter. Previous work has focused on the chapter as a device to structure the internal events of a narrative, as well as a means to affect narrative pace. In his essay “The Chapter in Fiction” Philip Stevick discusses the chapter as a structural unit containing events; however, common critical assumptions have been divided over whether to treat the chapter as a bibliographical or formal unit. This study identifies the chapter as a formal unit that is influenced by historical and bibliographic pressures. The chapter's ubiquity and seeming formlessness have made it a difficult object of study with traditional tools of literary analysis, but techniques in humanities computing provide new access to the stylistics of the chapter.

In his book, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode describes novels as “fictive models of the temporal world” in which readers must find a balance between realistic representations of time and necessary narrative deviations from this chronicity (Kermode 54-55). My stylistic analysis of the chapter focuses on grammatical and semantic temporal markers at the beginnings and ends of chapters. By investigating the stylistic trends in 19th century authors’ treatment of narrative time, I argue that historical, literary-historical, and bibliographic forces shape the form and function of the chapter across 19th century.

By the Nineteenth Century, the novel had been established as a largely chapter-based form; however, pressures of serialized publication demanded that authors reconsider the way they structured both their narratives and chapters. In a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens offers advice on how to write successful material for serial publication. He writes about what would happen if text that is not intended for serial publication gets divided and serialized anyway. He writes, "The scheme of the chapters, the manner of introducing the people, the progress of the interest, the places in which the principal places fall, are hopelessly against it. It would seem as though the story were never coming, and hardly ever moving. There must be a special design to overcome that specially trying mode of publication" (Grubb 143). Dickens insists that serial publication required novelists to rethink the way they structure their narratives. This study analyzes both serialized and non-serialized 19th century novels to ascertain the extent to which serialization affected the chapter as a formal unit.

Using distant reading techniques, I have studied stylistic trends in thirty-six Nineteenth Century novels: Non-serialized -- Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Frankenstein, Ivanhoe, The Entail (1823), The Last Man, Pelham (1828), The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Barchester Towers (1856), Jane Eyre, Villette, Henry Esmond, Tancred (1847), Mary Barton (1849) Mill on the Floss (1860), The Coral Island (1858), Black Beauty (1877), Dracula (1897) Serialized-- Jack Sheppard, Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, Vanity Fair, Hard Times, North and South, Our Mutual Friend, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Middlemarch, Beauchamp's Career, Can You Forgive Her?, The Way We Live Now, Wives and Daughters, David Copperfield, Treasure Island, The Trumpet Major. I selected novels based on their canonicity and tried to study works from a wide historical range. By close-reading chapter beginnings and endings, I have created classification categories for the main "types" of beginning and endings. These "types" treat diegetic temporality in distinct ways through different verb tenses and deictic markers. I classified chapter beginnings into the following types:

Type 0 — The narrator describes a character or place without direct references to diegetic time.
Type 1 — The narrator starts the chapter on "the next day"
Type 2 — The narrator begins the chapter where he leaves off, or in medias res often using the past progressive
Type 3 — The narrator summarizes the events of an interim period before entering a scene in the chapter.
Type 4 — The narrator uses phrases like "one day" to place the reader in an undefined place within diegetic time.
I differentiate these types based on defining grammatical and semantic markers that indicate the author’s different representations of temporality. I read the beginnings of every chapter from each of the novels and classify them into the category into which they fit best. I then compare the relative frequencies of types of chapter beginnings and endings using χ2 tests to determine whether significant differences between serialized and non-serialized novels appeared. These differences proved significant. Notably, the Type 3 and 4 beginnings occurred significantly more frequently in non-serialized novels than serialized novels. The difference in the relative frequencies of beginning types in serialized and non-serialized novels suggests not only that the chapter exists as a formal unit of narrative, but that historical and bibliographic changes affect this form.

Collaborating with Matthew Jockers and the Stanford Literary Lab, I am continuing to look at trends in a wider data set of novels. Matt Jockers has built software with the primary purpose of classifying the beginning and ending paragraphs of chapters in novels from the Chadwyck Healey 19th century British Fiction database. By obtaining data on over 250 novels, I aim to investigate the prevalence of particular beginning and end types across the 19th century as a whole to elucidate how and why authors divide their narratives as they do as well as to understand the role narrative time plays in these divisions.

References:
Grub, Gerald Giles “Dickens' Pattern of Weekly Serialization, ” ELH, 9:2 1942 141-156

Kermode, Frank The Sense of an Ending, Oxford University Press London 1966

Stevick, Philip The Chapter in Fiction; Theories of Narrative Division, Syracuse, N.Y. Syracuse Univ. Press 1970