ABSTRACT
The basic premise of this chapter is that the antebellum city mystery novel, which began with the French roman-feuilleton and quickly became an “international vogue” (Werner Sollors) in the 1840s and 50s, is one of the genres (if not the genre) in popular culture that encapsulates the defining processes of serialization, adaptation, and appropriation of that period. This chapter centers on practices of proliferation in and across different media that accompanied the popularization of the city mystery novel. It traces the emergence and the effects of these practices in order to better understand their impact on the development of an increasingly transnational and what might be termed ‘transmedial popular cultural sphere.’ Moreover, it offers a theoretical framework through which the nineteenth-century city mystery genre can be studied as an example of transnational and transmedial serialization.
