Serialization and Transmedia Narratives: An Archaeology (1900-1939)

This chapter examine the socio-economic context together with the technological, cultural, and social processes that shaped the modalities of seriality between the early 1900s and the 1930s. This period was characterized by three interrelated macro-phenomena:first, the definition of media formats, production and distribution models, and consumer cultures, which in various ways continued to reverberate throughout the Western world in the decades following World War II; second, the experimentation with new forms of transmedia serialization of narrative universes; and third, the construction of a technological imaginary that facilitated the transfer of the 19th-century literary and iconographic heritage into the domain of the electrified experience of the world, enabled above all by cinema and radio.