![]() ![]() In this essay I attempt to take account of the interpretive implications of seriality for understanding Southworth's novel, exploring some of the ways in which it was ideologically embedded in the Ledger and describing the active and canny role it played in that periodical's strident apoliticism. Thus, Southworth's novel offers a good test case for the claim that the material form of publication (in this case, periodical serialization) is a substantively important aspect of the work's meaning: the readers who responded to it so enthusiastically had all read it under the conditions of seriality. This bare fact about the material form in which it circulated and gained its large and admiring audience has consequences for interpreting the novel that have gone entirely unexamined by scholars. Southworth's originally massively popular novel, The Hidden Hand (1859), was not published as a book until it had undergone serialization three separate times, over the course of a quarter century, in a weekly story-paper called the New York Ledger. ![]()
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