: George Eliot's Serial Fiction. . Carol A. Martin.

1995 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-249
Author(s):  
J. Don Vann
Keyword(s):  
Serial Fiction

scholarly journals Profugos: new formats and regionalization in Latin American television serial fiction

2013 ◽  
pp. 08
Author(s):  
Luiza Lusvarghi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Soap Opera ◽  
Local Market ◽  
American Television ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
Intervention Policy ◽  
Serial Fiction ◽  
Tv Production

The resumption of audiovisual productions in Latin America during the 1990s have not onlyaffected the cinematographic sphere, but TV production as well. The latest production aimed at exploringthis genre is a Chilean series co-produced with HBO Latin America named Profugos (Runaways), featuringfour popular local actors and directed by Pablo Larraín of the acclaimed film Tony Manero (2008,Brazil/Chile). Profugos shows that definitely soap opera is no longer the only Latin American fictionalformat, besides dialoguing with the action genre global tradition, also marking the consolidation of majornetworks intervention policy towards the local market

In France, Neighbours, dubbed as Les voisins, was launched by Antenne 2 in August 1989. Screened twice daily at 11:30 and 5:45, it secured ratings of 24 per cent of the market, in fact Antenne 2’s average for that year. However, for reasons which Antenne 2 is unwilling to disclose, the evening screening was shifted after only ten editions to 6:30. This put it up against stronger competition from others of the then five channels, and its rating dropped to just below 16 percent of market share. A further scheduling change briefly preceded its demise after a total of only seven months’ screening. The 185 episodes purchased only just included the debut of Kylie Minogue at episode 169. According to its French agent, Rolande Cousin, Antenne 2 bought Neighbours exclusively on the basis of its colossal British success (Cousin 1992), a phenomenon mentioned by all six articles heralding Neighbours’s arrival on French screens; its Australian success was referred to by four articles (Baron 1989; Brugière 1989; Lepetit 1989; Pélégrin 1989; Thomann 1989; and A.W. 1989). The Minogue factor also appears significant. Her singing career peaked in 1988–1989, and among the six articles she rated one cover story (Télé 7 jours), an exclusive interview and a cover story with Jason Donovan (in Télé poche), and two other references (Brugière 1989; and Thomann 1989). Cousin identifies five other potential appeals in the program for French viewers: its sun, its “acceptable exoticism,” its lack of blacks (a sensitive topic in France, as witness the racist political career of Jean-Marie Le Pen), its lack of other disturbing social material, and its everyday issues (Cousin 1992). For all this potential appeal, Antenne 2 still delayed transmitting by three months, pushing its opening into August, when most of France goes on holiday, and opted instead for the American Top Models (Baron 1989: 25). This lack of confidence in its purchase instances what Cousin called a “Pavlovian reflex” against non-US serial fiction (Cousin 1992), and points to broader issues than the fame of two of the program’s principals. The French commentaries differ noticeably from the American in their assessment of the ten textual features of Neighbours singled out above. One feature – women as doers – is not mentioned at all. All other features are mentioned at least once. The two most often referred to are the everyday, and the domestic and suburban. But Neighbours’s non-exceptionality, its everyday realism, had a different status for French than for American reviewers. For most of the latter it offered a desirable antidote to the spectacular confections of home-grown soaps. For French reviewers it was treated in one of two ways. While some derogated the program’s perceived banality (Brugière 1989; Pélégrin 1989), others, whether high(er) brow or plugging the Minogue factor, remained curiously non-committal about its everyday realism. There was a similarly curious abstention from either positive or negative evaluation of the program. Commentators’ apparent unease with this centrally distinguishing feature of Neighbours, its everyday realism, suggests that it represented something of a conundrum in the mediascape, in particular the field of television serial fiction screened in France, and may well echo the unease evidently felt by its buyer. The reasons require some clarification.

2002 ◽  
pp. 125-125
Keyword(s):  
Market Share ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Cover Story ◽  
Political Career ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Textual Features ◽  
Serial Fiction

Within this field of serial fiction, American product leads, French ranks second, and British third. This triangular force field explains Neighbours’s anomalous position in the French market. American serial fiction is, in the form of Dallas especially, very well known in France. Such American imports are treated with a culturally characteristic ambivalence: admiration for the narrative drive and polish of American product counterposed by distaste for its spectacularization and superficiality. As seen with reference to the American market, a serial fiction market dominated by Dallas and Santa Barbara offers a less than congenial soil for a Neighbours to take root. French serial fiction production offers few more televisual referents to make Neighbours accessible/familiar/popular on French screens. Crucial here is a long history of French distaste for continuous television serial fiction: “you might say that French serial fiction quickly runs out of steam” (Bianchi 1990: 92). One French forte in this field is the series, the sequence of narratively discrete stories engaging the same characters (more or less) across (usually) weekly transmissions for some months. The best known examples are Les cinq dernières minutes, dating from 1958, Commissaire Moulin, and Maigret. Besides the series, the other forte of French television serial production is the mini-series. And the reasons underpinning the dominance of these two modes, especially the mini-series, will explain both the limited field of the French soapscape and the difficulties for a Neighbours. First, a cultural snobbery attaches to the mini-series, indicated by one critic’s sneering at the genre as representing “a serial of interminable insipidity, the television equivalent of the photo-novel or romance, destined above all to housewives [sic]” (Oppenheim 1990: 43; the sexism of this account may further point to certain assumptions about soaps among French television executives). High(er) cultural literature, in other words, commonly supplies the mini-series’ source material and cultural cachet. Second, then, French television scriptwriters have long traditions of the skills of literary compression and visualization of the psychological, skills which would be seen as wasted on scripting soaps. A further occupational/industrial factor working against the imminent success of soaps focuses on the reluctance of directors of mini-series and longer series to cede the dominant creative role to scriptwriters, the major creative force in continuous serials. And finally, actors in a country with vibrant film and theater industries are loath to commit themselves to the lengths of term required by soaps (Bianchi 1990: 96). These factors militate against the continuous fictional serial which involves a large number of characters engaged by multiple, interweaving plot strands of indeterminate duration and with limited resolution at the end of any given episode (usually 30 minutes long, and often stripped across three–five days weekly). Thus there were, at the time of Neighbours’s launch on French television, only four home-grown French soaps, of which the longest-running, Voisin, voisine, launched by La Cinq in September 1988, ran to only 360 episodes; contrast the British Coronation Street which started in 1960 and is still going! French soaps, then, “were far from proven successes” (A.W. 1989: 7). “The French have been uneasy about soaps” (Pélégrin

2002 ◽  
pp. 126-126
Keyword(s):  
Force Field ◽  
Source Material ◽  
The Other ◽  
Psychological Skills ◽  
Santa Barbara ◽  
Serial Production ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
History Of ◽  
Creative Role ◽  
Serial Fiction

‘These Acres of Print’: Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-58
Author(s):  
Jessica R. Valdez
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Serial Output ◽  
Benedict Anderson ◽  
Serial Publication ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City ◽  
Serial Fiction ◽  
Over Time

While Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers enable readers to imagine national community, Charles Dickens’s writings are attentive to the varying ways that the newspaper press might shape, inhibit, or fragment community through its uncontrolled production of miscellaneous content and matter. This first chapter shows the growing distinction that Dickens drew between fiction and nonfiction, novel and newspaper, in his communal visions for serial publication. Early Dickens characterised the newspaper press as a meteorological force of destruction, a thunderstorm threatening to engulf the city of London, yet continually produced to meet the endless public appetite for more news. Over the course of his career, Dickens experimented with other metaphors for the working of serial narrative and its influence on a reading public. From an intangible creature telling stories to a weaver at his loom, Dickens encourages readers to see the instance of a particular serial output linked to its larger structure over time. In doing so, he privileges the power of serial fiction to cultivate new ways of envisioning community.

scholarly journals ‘I Know What a Podcast Is’: Post-Serial Fiction and Podcast Media Identity

Podcasting ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 81-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Hancock ◽  
Leslie McMurtry
Keyword(s):  
Serial Fiction
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