ABSTRACT

This collective book analyzes seriality as a major phenomenon increasingly connecting audiovisual narratives (cinematic films and television series) in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The book historicizes and contextualizes the notion of seriality, combining narratological, aesthetic, industrial, philosophical, and political perspectives, showing how seriality as a paradigm informs media convergence and resides at the core of cinema and television history. By associating theoretical considerations and close readings of specific works, as well as diachronic and synchronic approaches, this volume offers a complex panorama of issues related to seriality including audience engagement, intertextuality and transmediality, cultural legitimacy, authorship, and medium specificity in remakes, adaptations, sequels, and reboots. 

Written by a team of international scholars, this book highlights a diversity of methodologies that will be of interest to scholars and doctoral students across disciplinary areas such as media studies, film studies, literature, aesthetics, and cultural studies. It will also interest students attending classes on serial audiovisual narratives and will appeal to fans of the series it addresses, such as Fargo, Twin Peaks, The Hunger Games, Bates Motel, and Sherlock.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

Cinematic, televisual, or post-serialities 1

part I|60 pages

Serial specificities

chapter 1.1|18 pages

Opening gambits

Cross-media self-reflexivity and audience engagement in serial cinema, 1936–2008 1

chapter 1.2|16 pages

Ensemble storytelling

Dramatic television seriality, the melodramatic mode, and emotions

chapter 1.3|24 pages

The cinematic-televisual

Rethinking medium specificity in television’s new Golden Age

part II|59 pages

Marketing seriality

chapter 2.1|24 pages

A forgotten episode in the history of Hollywood cinema, television, and seriality

The case of the Mirisch Company

chapter 2.2|19 pages

Diversions in the Hunger Games film series

The fragmented narrative of hijacked images

chapter 2.3|14 pages

Raising Caine

Hollywood remakes of Michael Caine’s Cockney cycle

part III|59 pages

Seriality and the cinematic/televisual convergence

chapter 3.1|20 pages

The (re)making of a serial killer

Replaying, “preplaying,” and rewriting Hitchcock’s Psycho in the series Bates Motel

chapter 3.2|18 pages

Fargo (FX, 2014–) and cinema

“Just like in the movie”?

chapter 3.3|19 pages

Screening dreams

Twin Peaks, from the series to the film, back again and beyond 1

part IV|61 pages

Meta-serialities

chapter 4.1|14 pages

In-between still and moving pictures

Series and seriality in Stephen Poliakoff’s serial drama Shooting the Past (1999)

chapter 4.2|20 pages

“The abominable bride”

Sherlock and seriality