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This book explores the historiographic importance, narrative patterns, marketing, and cultural reception of the serial genre through a wider contextualization of the serial phenomenon and its fearless female heroines led by Pearl White, who plays the title character in The Perils of Pauline. It investigates the complexities of Pearl White's performance and the overall cultural power of serial queens in many markets at a critical historical juncture in the history of cinema. It examines how the serial film became part of a rethinking of production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. It also considers the American film industry's expansion on the international market, fueled in large part by the profitable serial format, along with the serial craze's international impact. The book suggests that American serial films are an illustration of both globalization and an accompanying hegemonic practice of Hollywood cinema and the vicissitudes of glocalization.

This chapter examines the mediated cultural encounter between the American serial queen adventure and nüxiapian, a subgenre of Chinese martial arts films. The nüxiapian genre, featuring a female knight errant, first appeared on the 1920s silent screen and had a lasting influence in Chinese cinema. The chapter first provides an overview of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of the word “vernacular” as well as the cultural essentialist aspects of the martial arts films. It then considers the local as the site of irreducible heterogeneity that enabled active and plural modes of cultural translation, resulting in the “vernacular” body of nüxia. In analyzing the interaction between American serial queen films and the Chinese entertainment world of the 1910s and 1920s, the chapter underscores the dual promise of the May Fourth Vernacular Movement and its implication for Chinese cinema. It also highlights the rise of a particular configuration of the female body on Chinese silent films.

This chapter examines the fate of Pearl White's serials on the Swedish market during the early 1900s. More specifically, it analyzes the impact of censorship on White's films, and American serial films in general, in Sweden. Aside from censorship imposing stringent regulations on crime serials, traditional forms of marketing diluted the impact of the format and upset the chronology for the episodes, undercutting the popularity of the serial queens. Despite all the hype concerning her international following, White was never perceived as a truly big star in Sweden, mainly because only a selected few of her films actually made it to Swedish audiences. Out of her eleven serial films, only The Perils of Pauline and the three Exploits of Elaine serials were screened in Sweden. Furthermore, none of the Swedish copies have survived. The chapter also discusses Pathé Frère's impact on the Swedish film industry.