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This chapter discusses the ‘doubled’ inflectional pattern. Unlike the previous two patterns of inflection where the auxiliary verb (AUX-headed) or the lexical verb (LEX-headed) serves as the inflectional head, there are also a number of languages with AVCs where both the lexical verb and auxiliary verb serve as inflectional co-heads. With respect to the categories doubly marked in this doubled macro-pattern of inflection of auxiliary verb constructions, by far the most common doubled category is subject, occurring in around 80% of the examples. Doubled tense/aspect marking or fully doubly inflected forms (all TAM and referent categories, etc.) are much less common cross-linguistically speaking, but nevertheless occur in a range of unrelated languages. Although AVCs of the doubled pattern show a co-head relation between the lexical verb and the auxiliary verb inflectionally speaking, the auxiliary verb, as in the other patterns, is often the structural head, with the lexical verb bearing some overt index of dependency. On rare occasions, it is instead the auxiliary that is dependent-marked in doubled inflectional forms. The Doubled inflectional pattern of AVCs frequently arises from an original core serialized verb construction.

This chapter examines the take NP and construction to show how a close study of the distribution of a construction in discourse leads to a view of grammar as something fluid and unstable, that is, as emergent from, and inseparable from, its discourse environment. Verb serialization, in this view, would then be one part of an entire range of possible uses of the first verb, some of which have become grammaticalized, and which are in turn part of a general process whereby a word with a wide range of meanings projects subsequent stretches of discourse, ‘captures’ them, and hauls them into its scope. Verb serialization is thus, to the extent that it is not a borrowed feature, an emergent process.

Linguistic areas can develop where languages belong to linguogenetic groupings of completely different origins, rather than just different subgroups within a single language family. There is strong evidence, for example, that Austronesian languages of the Oceanic subgroup which have come into contact with non-Austronesian languages in the New Guinea area have acquired some originally non-Austronesian structural features as a result of contact. This has affected even major grammatical patterns such as the basic constituent order, with Oceanic languages in this area often exhibiting the widespread non-Austronesian SOV constituent order in contrast to other Oceanic languages. This chapter discusses the similarities and differences between languages, linguistic typology, serial verbs and serial verb constructions, quantification of serialization, and grammaticalization of serial verbs.

Using a case study this chapter discusses serial verbs in the Paamese language. The chapter attempts to describe all serial verb constructions that are used in the language, as well as a wide a range of serial verb-like constructions, in order to demonstrate the complexity of the distribution of structural patterns and sub-patterns in Paamese. The focus is on the Paamese language of Vanuatu. Paamese serial verbs exhibit patterns which appear in many respects to be fairly typical of a great number of Oceanic languages. In the discussion of serial verb constructions, the formal characteristics of the various patterns that are to be found, as well as the different functions performed by these constructions, are analysed. The chapter discusses core-layer serialization, nuclear-layer serialization, and multiple serialization in the Paamese language, as well as the fuzzy edges of Paamese serial verbs, non-verbal elements coopted as serial verbs, and serialized kati.

Given that serial verbs appear to be widely distributed only within the Oceanic languages, the question that arises in this chapter is where patterns such as those previously described for Paamese arise? This chapter examines whether the modern distribution of these kinds of patterns is the result of direct inheritance from a pattern which was acquired only once — presumably in Proto Oceanic — or whether Proto Oceanic itself was also a non-serializing language, with such patterns having been acquired independently in its various descendant languages. Basically, the languages of Micronesia and Polynesia provide little evidence for serial verb constructions. The non-Austronesian languages of Melanesia are well known for their extensive patterns of verb serialization. This chapter looks at previous surveys of Oceanic serial verbs, Admiralties languages, Western Oceanic languages, Central and Eastern Oceanic languages, and St. Mathias languages. The chapter concludes by determining what sorts of grammatical patterns can be reconstructed for Proto Oceanic languages, with emphasis on the reconstruction of syntax.

This chapter discusses the distribution and development of serial verbs in Melanesian pidgin, with emphasis on language contact between mainly Oceanic languages and English in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The different varieties of Melanesian pidgin — Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, Pijin in Solomon Islands, and Bislama in Vanuatu — represent a predominantly English-lexifier contact language in which significant elements of the structure have been attributed to transfer from predominantly Oceanic substrate grammatical patterns. The chapter examines verb serialization in the pidgin of Melanesia, as well as sources of serial verbs in Melanesian pidgin, and grammaticalization of serial verbs in Melanesian pidgin.

This chapter examines a number of broader issues suggested by the kinds of patterns of verb serialization that have been observed in Oceanic languages. One major question that can be asked about serial verb constructions relates to whether or not such a pattern represents some kind of substantive linguistic universal. A survey of a selection of accounts of Oceanic languages, carried out with a view to establishing a relationship between poorness of adpositions and richness of serial verbs (with languages presented in order of increasing adpositional richness), shows that there is no consistent correlation between adpositional poverty and serial verb richness. The chapter discusses serial verbs and linguistic typology, as well as cognitive implications of serial verb constructions and serial verbs and linguistic theory.

Chapter Two shifts perspective from an investigation of various photographic methods and techniques to close analysis of the actual roles of photographs in scientific argumentation. Focusing on the single most influential racial definition of Jews between the 1880s and the 1920s- the idea of the Jews as a mixed race people- the chapter analyzes the role photographs played in the scientific economy of this idea. In this vein, the chapter traces a genealogy from Felix von Luschan, through Maurice Fishberg, to Sigmund Feist. The analysis reveals a transformation in the use of photographs, from illustrations of an argument in the 1890s to the gradual emergence of serialized photographs in the 1910s. It shows that, in the transformation of the racial photograph from icon to matrix, photographs were more thoroughly integrated into scientific demonstration. The chapter agues that this transformation destabilized definitions of both “type” and “race”. The chronologically ordered narrative is interrupted by two excurses that intersect the immediate subjects of the chapter. The first focuses on the interaction between Felix von Luschan and Hermann Struck, and explores the exchange between art and science. The second reflects on the relationship between the archive and the imagination in the history of race and photography. 

Chapter Three analyzes the photographic practice of Hans F.K. Günther, the most popular theoretician of race in Weimar and Nazi Germany, who provided Weimar and Nazi Germany with a racial visual code. Günther employed photographs to concretize ideas, rendering them accessible to a wide public. The chapter shows how he concretized Houston Stewart Chamberlain's idea of a specific form of Aryan “seeing,” merging scientific objectivity with racial relativism and bringing together Fischer's “Mendelian photography” with Chamberlain's concept of Anschauung. Applying Paul Ricoeur's notion of “hermeneutics of suspicion” to Günther's choice and layout of photographs, the chapter demonstrates that Günther transformed his audience into “suspicious” observers. The chapter debates that Günther applied in practice techniques and ideas of de-habituation developed by Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky's and playwright Berthold Brecht. Günther’s photographic series are compared with Wittgenstein's notion of “family resemblance,” pointing to transformations in the notion of the “Jewish type.” The chapter ends with the relationship between the visible and invisible in Günther’s use of photography, and the role of photography for the totalization of experience.

This first section maps out the argument concerning the relationship between sensation, performance, and the press through the key figures of the female author-editors Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat. Each of these writers is introduced in the larger context of women's journalism in the nineteenth century and the modulating status of editorship during this period. The Introduction then considers the term ‘sensation’, its early definitions, its current contested status, and the ways in which this book uses it to describe an enabling idiom for women writers. In considering Judith Butler's understanding of performativity the chapter also provides a theoretical underpinning for the connections the book explores between the self-conscious performances of gender and of genre.

The first chapter explores the new conditions of the press in the 1850s and 1860s that made it possible for Braddon, Wood and Marryat to become successful author-editors. The trends in the periodical press towards greater proportions of serialized fiction and the rise of the celebrity editor (notably Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton) gave rise to a magazine market in which Braddon, Wood, and Marryat could flourish. The beginnings of the feminist press formulated by the Langham Place Group also provided important exemplars as to how popular, fiction-based magazines might retain a political perspective on the woman question. These mid-century changes to press culture offer a new context for the success of sensation fiction of the 1860s and 1870s.

No less significant than Sterne's experiments with the material resources of print technology were his use of, and play on, a commercial innovation that had been fuelling book-trade expansion since the 1730s: serial publication. The protracted and erratic accumulation of Tristram Shandy's original volumes, and the protracted and interrupted experience of its original readers, have major interpretative implications. Through the mechanism of serialization, Sterne engineered something we need to view more as an unstable process than as a static product, and one that renders open and active many of the themes that dominate modern interpretations: the resistance of memory and ongoing experience to textual capture; the human consciousness of time, and the manipulation of time in narrative; the prolonged drama of digressive writing and progressive disease in which Tristram fails to record his life in the past while watching it waste in the present. In this context it becomes possible to see Tristram Shandy not as a parody of 19th-century realism, as Viktor Shklovsky famously suggests, but as a parody of Victorian serial fiction, and of the organizational, temporal, and commercial dilemmas in which it entangled its exponents. The point is epitomized by the experience of George Eliot during the writing of Middlemarch, when she looked incongruously back to Tristram Shandy for an ideal of creative autonomy that eluded her in practice.

Illusions of proleptic parody in Sterne always derive, on inspection, from his conscious parody of existing texts or trends, and so it is with his anticipation of the hazards and pitfalls of Victorian serial fiction. Though relatively unexplored, and varyingly widely in its conventions and procedures from the Victorian norm, serial publication was a vital part of mid-18th-century print culture. Its resources were also creative used — by many writers of journalism, encyclopedias, history, autobiography, and fiction — to amplify and generate meaning, one such resource being the serial's capacity to perform narratives of developing or fluctuating selfhood, or the different stages and outcomes of disease. This broad context, from Addison's Spectator through Rapin's History to Smollett's Sir Launcelot Greaves, enables a fresh approach to Wayne Booth's famous question: ‘Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?’ Dramatized in the continuous present of serialization, the novel's unfolding tale of failing health not only gives Tristram's losing battle with narrative language its peculiar urgency and weight; it also supplies in advance an internal, fictionalized reason for the premature close of his work.

French novels were associated throughout the nineteenth century with the infamous Holywell Street. However, they were far more widely obtainable, and readily consumed, than this suggests. Libraries such as the fairly exclusive London Library, Mudie’spopular Select Library, and working-class institutions, did their part to make them available; surviving archives paint a vivid picture of the public appetite for novels by writers such as Dumas and Paul de Kock. Booksellers such as Jeffs and Rolandi were important in supplying readers with contemporary trends, but they also took on additional roles as editors and members of Anglo-French networks. Periodicals, meanwhile, made French literature available to readers who had not necessarily been searching for it. Long serializations of the 1840s aimed predominantly at a less wealthy audience, and translations geared towards a growing middle-class (and often female) market in the 1860s, further demonstrate the omnipresence of French literature in Victorian culture.

In the 1880s and 1890s Walter Besant was one of Britain’s most lionized living novelists. Today he is one of the least read Victorian fiction writers of comparable standing. In addition to outlining the contents of this volume, the introduction provides an overview of Besant’s life and career.

Walter Besant was a very successful novelist in the late nineteenth century but his income never quite matched his popularity, which rose in the 1880s and slowly fell thereafter. He did not use the royalty system in his contracts but instead sold his copyrights either outright or for a limited term to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers. This was probably an expression of his doubts about the longer-term success of his work. He was one of the earliest significant novelists to use the services of A. P. Watt, the first formal literary agent in the UK. Watt was able to farm Besant’s literary property by splitting it into UK book rights (usually sold to Chatto and Windus), foreign book rights, first serialisation rights, second serialisation rights, and syndication in various newspaper and magazine markets in the USA, Europe, and British Empire. In the 1890s Besant earned an average of £1,750 for each of his major novels. Besant claimed that Watt had increased his income significantly. There is evidence that Watt did have an effect, but that Besant becoming a solo writer after 1881 – and gaining securer income in the USA from the Chace Act (1891) – were the more important factors.

The Afterword discusses how the interlocking between forms of seriality in associationist theories of memory and the print medium of serial fiction demonstrates an extended historical development of the reciprocal linkage between mode of reception and material form in modern media. This recursiveness in turn articulates a model for understanding how early twenty-first century digital serial media may elicit new virtual and participatory forms of social relation.