As brilliant as the book is,...It is possible, though, that Pettitt's seriality, like the revolutions of 1848, is a scalar topic impossible to package and neatly label.
Clare Pettitt is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King's College London. She is author of Patent Inventions: Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (OUP, 2004) and 'Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?': Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers and Empire (Profile/Harvard, 2007). In June 2020, she published Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 with Oxford University Press, which is the first volume of a three-volume reassessment of the impact of the media on political and literary culture from 1815 to 1918. The second part, entitled Serial Revolutions 1848: Writing, Politics, Form, shows how press reports and literary witness accounts of the 1848 European revolutions were crucial to creating international ideas of global citizenship and human rights. The third and final part will track the emergence of the digital and its effects on literary culture and imperial and racial identities.