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College and Research Libraries
July 2004, Vol. 65, No. 4
Book Review
Patricia Okker. Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-century America. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Pr., 2003. 202p. alk. paper, $37.50 (ISBN 0813922402). LC 2003-6547.
Professor Okker has given us a small book on a big topic: serial fiction in nineteenth-century America. Even so, simply by raising it, she reminds us that this is a major and underinvestigated area in the history of the book in North America. At the beginning of the new republic, there were about twelve magazines competing for readers; by the end of the nineteenth century, there were more than 3,000—and growing. Central to the evolution and success of magazines, Okker argues, was their increasing openness to serial fiction as a way of growing and maintaining audiences. The enormous success of Dickens’s serial fiction on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1840s created a golden age of magazine fiction that lasted until the very end of the century, when economics and immigration changed the editorial practices at major magazines. As a business plan, serial fiction was deceptively simple: capture the audience’s attention and hold it as long as possible. It was only when selling advertising became more lucrative—and easier—than recruiting and retaining stables of house authors that the business model shifted, and serialized fiction went into permanent decline. In between, there were many stories to be told and Okker offers us a sampling.
The title of her book alludes to her argument: serialized fiction was peculiarly "social" in that it created and spoke to communities of readers. But doesn’t all fiction, all literature, do that to one extent or another? What Okker has in mind here, however, is the observation that with serialized fiction you get communities of people reading the same thing at the same time. Or at least, such is the argument. The problem is that it is not an argument at all but, rather, an assumption; and on this assumption the edifice of the book is built. Indeed, the generic problem with studies such as Okker’s is that there really is no good body of evidence to which a scholar can turn that would document the existence of "communities of readers." Who were they? Where were they? And, most important of all, what difference does their existence or nonexistence make anyway?
Thus, Okker does what so many others in her situation have done: she argues inferentially from the text to the reader, a practice that scholars such as Roger Chartier have been trying to wean us from for many years now. Undeterred, Okker narrows a very large field of possible examples to a mere handful of case studies, beginning with Jeremy Belknap’s The Foresters in the late eighteenth century and concluding with William Dean Howell’s A Modern Instance, at the end of the nineteenth century. Along the way, she considers fiction by Ann Stephens, William Simms, Martin R. Delany, and the prolific Rebecca Harding Davis, surely the queen of the magazine novel.
With each of her writers, Okker stalks a similar topos, tying texts to social, political, and cultural contexts: the ratification of the Constitution; gender and fashion; sectionalism and slavery; and the marketplace and the fate of literature. In general, her readings seem balanced and grounded, and she almost succeeds in making minor talents such as Belknap actually interesting. That magazine fiction in the nineteenth century connected with the ebb and flow of events of the day, hot-button issues, and smoldering anxieties seems clear from Okker’s patient reading of her sources. But it is one thing to relate texts to contexts; it is quite another to explain how they were received and why. Okker’s book is valuable not for what it wants to say about "reading communities" but, rather, for what it has to say about relationships among writers, editors, and magazine publishers in the long nineteenth century. As a contribution to the history of the book, Social Stories is worth a read if only for its ability to throw light on an understudied, but important, niche in nineteenth-century publishing.—Michael Ryan, University of Pennsylvania.
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