Journal of European Popular Culture - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014

Between 1830 and 1930, Europe underwent radical change and entered modernity, by the emersion and expansion of a multimedia and mass culture, crossing linguistic and national boundaries and overturning cultural practices, sparking the imagination of countless individuals and providing new and cosmopolitan icons for the collective imagination. The history and main aspects of this cultural New Deal are first described, to emphasize afterwards that transmedia storytelling and convergence culture could be early observed on a wide European and even intercontinental scale, within the framework of the first multimedia ‘common market’ of European fiction. This argument will be illustrated by drawing from a wide range of examples.

Literature, having become the book-text, drew new power from its ability to convince that it could account for the world and express its changes. But the novel was not only a privileged form for representing the world in the new era of capital. It also became a commodity. This article draw synthetically from two different bodies of research that have produced separate sets of objects and tools over the last twenty years: those concerned with the organization of a global book market, and those concerned with the evolution of popular forms. Following the expansion of the popular novel, this work underline common processes in the making of reading markets, shared imagined references – where classical historical history of literature focuses on national making, and links between the strong points of European culture.

The question of the circulation of imaginaries is crucial for anyone interested in serial fiction texts, where the reception of the work is mediated by a broader series of which the text forms a part and with which it enters into a dialogue. Serial literature circulates globally, drawing a complex geography of imaginaries, literary currents and aesthetics that we can only map out by understanding the different flows, zones of influence and periodicities at work in the devising of international imaginaries. The texts do not exist in isolation: they are written as part of a dialogue with other texts and aesthetics, which do not stop at the borders of a single country, so much so that the study of the circulation of texts sometimes appears to matter more than approaches focusing on the text in itself. The globalization of imaginaries thus appears as a dialogue between local mechanisms and imported forms, according to a game of resistance, assimilation and reconfiguration. It is useful in such cases to look at such mechanisms at work within the creation of a series, while taking into account the architextual heritage and the logics associated with the culture industries and with the local structure of the media.

The transnational circulation of comic strips began as soon as comics appeared as an art form. Before 1945, the names of the pioneers were rapidly eclipsed by the success of the medium, making it difficult to establish geographic lines of descent, and more generally a ‘genealogy’ of the medium. This article describes a few of the trends at work in the different mechanisms of transnational circulation during the first century of this medium’s history (1830–1945). It focuses on the work of little-known go-betweens – influential in their time but since forgotten, like popular imagery artists in the 1870s, and Martin Branner in the 1920s – which explains apparent gaps and anachronisms in the transnational circulation of comic strips.

This article addresses the issue of ‘European popular cinema’ by discussing a very specific phenomenon, i.e. the crime series produced in the years immediately preceding World War I (e.g. Victorin Jasset’s Nick Carter, Viggo Larsen’s Arsène Lupin contra Sherlock, Ubaldo Maria del Colle’s Raffles, il ladro misterioso, Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas, George Pearson’s Ultus). On the one hand, the transnational circulation of these films is seen as the result of the development of the European cultural industries since the late nineteenth century; on the other hand, the rapid decline of this genre testifies of the historical peculiarity of this production. In particular, the popular heroic figure of the ‘gentleman thief’ seems to express at the same time the liberating, anti-hierarchial ethos of modernization and the dream of a quiet conciliation of the new and the traditional values: as a consequence, it might be regarded as a telling example of the economical, social and ideological transformations of that crucial phase in European history, when the development of the second industrial revolution and the first phase of ‘globalization’ pointed at the birth of a supranational sphere before the outbreak of World War I, which would temporarily stop this process.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most famous holmesian stories. Of course, there are many reasons for this extraordinary success, an immediate, lasting and worldwide success. Above all, the publishing and circulation methods of this novel are representative of the twentieth-century media tic culture. Indeed, the novel takes place in a serial process, previously elaborate (the first Holmesian narrative was published in 1887), offering both Holmesian tradition and innovation in its poetic. Arthur Conan Doyle pursues the process of mythification for Sherlock Holmes as a hero. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the most transposed of all the Holmesian stories: origin and result at a time of this durable success.