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Nineteenth-Century Serial
Narrative in Transnational
Perspective, 1830s–1860s
Popular Culture –Serial Culture

Edited by
Daniel Stein
Lisanna Wiele
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing
and Culture

Series Editor
Joseph Bristow
Department of English
University of California - Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a mono-
graph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary
works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of
the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siécle. Attentive to the historical continu-
ities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that
help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century
marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim
of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on
our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from
critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-
1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles
in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings
of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14607
 Daniel Stein • Lisanna Wiele
Editors

Nineteenth-Century
Serial Narrative in
Transnational
Perspective,
1830s–1860s
Popular Culture—Serial Culture
Editors
Daniel Stein Lisanna Wiele
Department of English Department of English
University of Siegen University of Siegen
Siegen, Germany Siegen, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture

ISBN 978-3-030-15894-1    ISBN 978-3-030-15895-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15895-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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Cover illustration: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

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Switzerland AG
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 Foreword

In the first half of the nineteenth century, as newspapers began publishing

fiction in addition to the regular news reports, many editors adopted the
“feuilleton line”: a dark horizontal line across the page that marked every-
thing above the line as news and everything below as fiction. Whether
intended to subjugate fiction to the so-called ground floor or, perhaps, to
draw attention to its presence, the feuilleton line has long been under-
stood as enforcing a distinction between the serious news above and the
imaginative entertainment below.
The reality of nineteenth-century serials, however, as Daniel Stein
and Lisanna Wiele’s new collection makes abundantly clear, is that the
line was itself always a fiction. With essays on France, England, the
United States, Brazil, Austria, and Turkey, Nineteenth-Century Serial
Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s: Popular Culture–
Serial Culture offers compelling evidence of the serial’s insistence on
blurring the line between news and entertainment, fact and fiction.
These chapters explore how the conventions of seriality are inseparable
from the world documented above the feuilleton line: a world of politics
and crime and race and nation building.
As many scholars of seriality have described, the serial structure depends
on a constant balance or tension between satisfying a reader’s (or viewer’s)
desire for what is familiar and what is new. Audiences revel in imagining
the new twists of a serial plot, even while they seek familiar characters and
regularly timed, sometimes quite precisely, publication schedules. This
collection likewise balances the new and the familiar. Not surprisingly, sev-
eral chapters explore the popular city mysteries, which launched the serial

v
vi FOREWORD

novel in much of Europe and the world. Others offer unexpected delights:
the development of the Ottoman/Turkish serial, the connections between
seriality and statistical discourse.
Although the chapters rely on different methodologies, the collection
itself offers a consistent portrait of mid-nineteenth-century serials as loud,
unruly, and chaotic. More timely than the editors may have originally
imagined, the collection’s repeated return to that blurriness of the “feuil-
leton line” exposes, at least implicitly, twenty-first-century wrestling with
reality television, binge viewing, and the so-called fake news. This collec-
tion, then, like the serials of our time and theirs, offers insight into the rich
ways that serial literature reflects upon and responds to the essential—and
messy—questions of the communities from which they are born.

Columbia, MO, USA Patricia Okker

 Contents

1 Introducing Popular Culture—Serial Culture: Serial

Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s  1
Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele

Part I The Transnational Spread of the Feuilleton Novel  17

2 The Beginnings of the Feuilleton Novel in France and the

German-Speaking Regions 19
Norbert Bachleitner

3 Spectacular, Spectacular: Early Paris Mysteries and

Dramas 49
Walburga Hülk

4 The Interaction between Serial Fictions and Nonfictional

Texts in the Kölnische Zeitung in the 1850s and 1860s 65
Fabian Grumbrecht

5 Brazilian–French Cultural Contact in a Serial Format:

The Revista Popular (Rio de Janeiro, 1859–1862) 81
Ricarda Musser

vii
viii CONTENTS

6 A Distant Reading of the Ottoman/Turkish Serial Novel

Tradition (1831–1908) 95
Reyhan Tutumlu and Ali Serdar

Part II The Antebellum Literary Market: Authors,

Publishers, Institutions 115

7 Between Hamburg and Boston: Frederick Gleason and

the Rise of Serial Fiction in the United States117
Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray

8 The Serial Character of Abolition: Charting Transatlantic

and Gendered Critiques of Slavery in The Liberty Bell145
Pia Wiegmink

9 Ride with Capitola: E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden

Hand as a “Loud Text” in Serial Antebellum Culture161
Gunter Süß

10 Counting (on) Crime in De Quincey and Poe: Seriality,

Crime Statistics, and the Emergence of a Mass Literary
Market175
Nicola Glaubitz

Part III The City Mystery Novel in England and the United

States 191

11 Serial Culture in the Nineteenth Century: G.W.M.

Reynolds, the Many Mysteries of London, and the Spread of
Print193
Mark W. Turner

12 The Media Mysteries of London213

Tanja Weber
 CONTENTS ix

13 Of Ladies, Fruit Girls, and Brothel Madams: Womanhood

and Female Sexuality in American City Mystery Novels231
Heike Steinhoff

14 Dead Man Walking: On the Physical and Geographical

Manifestations of Sociopolitical Narratives in George
Thompson’s City Crimes—or Life in New York and Boston247
Lisanna Wiele

15 Henry Boernstein, Radical, and The Mysteries of St. Louis

as a Political Novel271
Matthias Göritz

16 Slavery as Racial Dis/order in Antebellum America: The

Case of the City Mystery Novel287
Daniel Stein

17 (Re-)Making American Culture: The Crystal Palace and

the Transnational Series and Adaptations of Antebellum
New York City311
Florian Groß

Index329
 Notes on Contributors

Norbert Bachleitner is Professor of Comparative Literature at the

University of Vienna, Austria. His fields of interest include reception stud-
ies, especially the reception of nineteenth-century English and French lit-
erature in the German-speaking area; translation studies, especially the
role of translation in the international literary transfer; social history of
literature; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality; and the
study of new forms of literature distributed via the internet. His most
recent book publications are an essay volume co-edited with Christine
Ivanovic: Nach Wien! Sehnsucht, Distanzierung, Suche. Literarische
Darstellungen Wiens aus komparatistischer Perspektive (2015); and Die lit-
erarische Zensur in Österreich von 1751 bis 1848 (2017).
Nicola Glaubitz has been a researcher and lecturer in Siegen, Frankfurt,
and Darmstadt and has held a visiting professorship at Technical University
Darmstadt, Germany. She is a research assistant at the Institute for
Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Essen), doing research on long con-
temporary novels and their reading communities. Her PhD thesis is on
literature and philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment; her habilitation
thesis (“Mimicking Normality: Crime, Self and Art in the Novels of
Patricia Highsmith and Other Anglophone Writers,” Goethe University,
Frankfurt (2014)) concerns crime writing and normality. Her key research
areas are literature and sociology, literature and audiovisual media, and
early modern English drama.

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Matthias Göritz studied philosophy and literary studies and spent

extended periods in Moscow, Paris, and Chicago. He was
­Writer-in-­Residence at Bard College, New York, and at the Deutsches
Haus at New York University, and guest in the International Writing
Program at The University of Iowa, as well as Max Kade Writer at
Washington University in St. Louis. After publications in magazines, his
first volume of poetry, Loops, was published in 2001. Göritz was awarded
the Hamburg Literature Prize and the Mara Cassens Prize for his first
novel The Short Dream of Jakob Voss (2005). In fall 2006, his second col-
lection of poetry, Pools, was published. Göritz received the grant of the
state of Lower Saxony for these poems. He was the winner of the Warsaw
Haiku contest in 2008. In 2011, Göritz was awarded the Robert Gernhardt
Prize. In 2013, he published the novel Dreamers and Sinners (Munich:
C.H. Beck). An American translation is in preparation. In 2014, Göritz
was the first recipient of the William Gass Award. He teaches creative writ-
ing part time at Washington University in St. Louis. The novella Shanghai
Blues (with 20 artworks by Vanja Vukovic) was published in 2015 by
Edition Faust (Frankfurt am Main). His novel Parker just came out with
C.H. Beck Verlag.
Florian Groß teaches American Studies at Leibniz University Hannover,
Germany, where he is writing his PhD thesis “Negotiating Creativity in Post-
Network Television Series.” He is co-editor of The Aesthetics of Authenticity:
Medial Constructions of the Real (2012) and has written articles on the televi-
sion series 30 Rock, Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay, the High Line, and world’s fairs in New York City.
Fabian Grumbrecht is a PhD candidate at the University of Göttingen,
Germany, studying serial narration in popular German-language periodi-
cals from 1850 to 1890. His research interests also include paratextuality,
intertextuality, intermediality, narratology, and mass communication.
Walburga Hülk is Professor of Romance Literatures at the University of
Siegen, Germany, and also held visiting professorships at the University of
California, Berkeley; Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris;
and the University of Valenciennes, France. Hülk has conducted several
research projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in
French and Italian Literature and Media, focused on modernity and avant-
gardes. Her fields of interest include studies in medieval literature and the
literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and his main focus
has been on the dialogue of literature and sciences and the social history
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

of literature. Hülk’s last books have been the following: Haussmann und
die Folgen: Vom Boulevard zur Boulevardisierung (ed. with Gregor
Schuhen, 2012); Bewegung als Mythologie der Moderne: Vier Studien zu
Baudelaire, Flaubert, Taine, Valéry (2012); Die Krise als Erzählung (ed.
with Uta Fenske, Gregor Schuhen, 2013); Bohème nach ’68 (ed. with Nicole
Pöppel, Georg Stanitzek, 2015); and Mauern, Grenzen, Zonen: Geteilte
Städte in Literatur und Film (ed. with Stephanie Schwerter, 2018). Her latest
monograph in process is Als Paris die Moderne erfand: Der Rausch der Jahre
1850 bis 1870 (2019).
Ricarda Musser studied Portuguese, Psychology, and Library and
Information Science at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. She
holds a PhD with a thesis titled “Libraries and Librarianship in Portugal.”
She works at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin, and is the director
of the Media Department and Bibliographer for Brazil, Chile, and
Portugal. She coordinates the project “Latin American Cultural
Magazines” (funded by the German Research Foundation). Her main
research interests are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel literature,
Latin American popular culture and literature, as well as German emigra-
tion to Latin America, especially to Brazil.
Patricia Okker is Dean of College of Arts and Science and Professor of
English at the University of Missouri, United States. Her publications
include Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-­
Century American Woman Editors (1995), Social Stories: The Magazine
Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (2003), and the edited collection
Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction (2011).
Ali Serdar graduated from Middle East Technical University, Department
of Sociology, in 1998. He obtained his M.A. and PhD from Bilkent
University, Department of Turkish Literature, in 2002 and 2007, respec-
tively. He has been working as an instructor at Özyeğin University, Faculty
of Social Sciences, since 2012. His major areas of research interests are the
Turkish novel, literary theory, Turkish modernization, and the history of
Turkish thought. Serdar conducted a project titled “History of Serial
Novel in Turkish Literature (1830–1928),” supported by the Scientific
and Technological Research Council of Turkey. He is one of the editors of
the Tefrika series published by Koç Üniversity Press.
Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural
Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany, and past director of the sub-­
project “Serial Politicization: On the Cultural Work of American City
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Mysteries, 1844–1860” of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—

Aesthetics and Practice” (2013–2016), funded by the German Research
Foundation. He is the author of Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong,
Autobiography, and American Jazz (2012) and co-editor, most recently,
of the special section “Transnational Graphic Narratives” of the
International Journal of Comic Art (2018). He is one of the editors of the
Anglia journal and book series (De Gruyter) and a recipient of the 2013
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize for outstanding scholarly achievements.
Heike Steinhoff is Junior Professor (Assistant Professor) of American
Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Her main areas of research
are gender studies, body studies, and the study of the discursive interrela-
tion of cities and sexualities. She is the author of Transforming Bodies:
Makeovers and Monstrosities in American Culture (2015) and Queer
Buccaneers: (De)Constructing Boundaries in the Pirates of the Caribbean
Film Series (2011).
Gunter Süß is Assistant Professor at Mittweida University of Applied
Sciences, Germany. He received his PhD from Chemnitz University in
2005 for a dissertation on the aural in film and computer games (Sound
Subjects: Zur Rolle des Tons in Film und Computerspiel, 2006). Süß com-
pleted his second book project (Habilitation) on American cultures of the
mid-nineteenth-century (“‘Laute Texte’: Diskurse des Konflikts in der
Kultur des antebellum”) in 2015 and was awarded the venia legendi for
American Studies as well as Media Studies. Research interests include cul-
tural theory, film and TV studies, and popular culture.
Mark W. Turner is Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century
Literature at King’s College London, London. His research interests
include the relationship between literature, media, and culture since the
nineteenth century, and Anglo-American queer studies. Turner has writ-
ten widely on various aspects of literature, journalism, photography, film,
painting, and popular culture and is co-editing a major new edition of
Oscar Wilde’s journalism for Oxford University Press. Recent projects
include an article on Derek Jarman and London in the 1980s as well as
one on the idea of “zigzagging” in the modern city. Additionally, Turner
is working on a piece about literature and global movement in the nine-
teenth century and developing a new project about the American gallerist
Betty Parsons and her queer artists.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Reyhan Tutumlu graduated from the Department of Radio-Television-­

Cinema, Ankara University, Faculty of Communication in 1998. She
received her M.A. and PhD in 2002 and 2007, respectively, from the
Department of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University. She received the
2007 Memet Fuat Criticism Reward for her doctoral dissertation.
Tutumlu’s major areas of research interests are narratology, the nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century Turkish novel, the serial novel, novel-­
cinema relations, and gender and women’s literature. Since 2009, Tutumlu
has been working as an instructor in the School of Languages in Sabancı
University. She worked as a researcher in the “History of Serial Novels in
Turkish Literature (1831–1928)” project. She is one of the editors of the
Tefrika series published by Koç Üniversity Press.
Tanja Weber is a lecturer at the Department for Media Culture & Theatre
at the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research focuses on television
studies. She has written extensively on television viewing practices as well
as TV series and formats. Her dissertation Kultivierung in Serie (2012)
examines cultural adaptation strategies in TV series. Further research
interests include media history, especially early serial narratives, early film,
and the history of photography. She is working on a history of quality
standards for public media based on Germany’s Grimme Prize for TV
excellence.
Pia Wiegmink is an Assistant Professor at the Obama Institute for
Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz,
Germany. She is author of Protest EnACTed (2011), co-editor of
Approaching Transnational America in Performance (2016), and German
Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery (2018). In addition, Wiegmink
has written numerous articles on political performance, on American dra-
matist Naomi Wallace, on the Obama campaign of 2008, and on American
antislavery literature. Together with Birgit Bauridl (University of
Regensburg), she heads an international research network on “Cultural
Performance in Transnational American Studies” (2015–2018), which is
funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Lisanna Wiele is a research associate and PhD candidate at the University
of Siegen, Germany. She was a member of the sub-project “Serial
Politicization: On the Cultural Work of American City Mysteries,
1844–1860” of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Practice,” funded by the German Research Foundation. She holds an

M.A. in American Studies from the University of Göttingen. Her research
interests range within US American popular culture from the nineteenth
to the twenty-first centuries.
Mary Saracino Zboray is a visiting scholar in the Department of
Communication, University of Pittsburgh, United States. She has co-­
authored (with Ronald J. Zboray) several essays on antebellum US and
American Civil War-era print culture, as well as four books, including A
Handbook for the Study of Book History in the United States (2000) and
Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book
(2005). She is completing with Ronald J. Zboray a book manuscript titled
“The Bullet in the Book: Volumes that Saved Civil War Soldiers’ Lives.”
Ronald J. Zboray is Professor of Communication and Director of the
Graduate Program for Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh,
United States. He is the author of A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic
Development and the American Reading Public (1993) and numerous arti-
cles on antebellum US publishing and reading. He is the co-author (with
Mary Zboray) of several additional essays on US cultural history and four
books on topics including US print culture and antebellum women’s parti-
sanship. His co-edited volume, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture,
Volume 5, U.S. Popular Print Culture to 1860, was published in 2019.
 List of Figures

Graph 6.1 Frequency of serialized indigenous novels by year 104

Graph 6.2 Frequency of translated serial novels by year 108
Graph 6.3 Comparison of frequencies of indigenous and translated serial
novels by year 109
Fig. 7.1 “View of the Interior.” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room
Companion, 8 May 1852: 297, courtesy American
Antiquarian Society 130
Fig. 7.2 “Contributors for the Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion
and the Flag of Our Union.” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-
Room Companion, 3 January 1852: 9, courtesy American
Antiquarian Society 131
Fig. 12.1 Ellen as a Venus. G.W.M Reynolds, The Mysteries of London.
London: Vickers, 217 217
Fig. 12.2 Ellen at the Statuary. G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of
London. London: Vickers, 169 218
Fig. 12.3 Ellen as a Medium. G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of
London. London: Vickers, 257 219
Fig. 12.4 The Youth. G.W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London.
London: Vickers, 1 226

xvii
 List of Tables

Table 6.1 The authors whose novels were serialized most frequently 101
Table 6.2 Serial novels written by women writers 102
Table 6.3 The writers whose works were most frequently translated 106

xix
 CHAPTER 1

Introducing Popular Culture—Serial

Culture: Serial Narrative in Transnational
Perspective, 1830s–1860s

Daniel Stein and Lisanna Wiele

Recent publications have emphasized that serial modes of storytelling,

publication, and reception have been among the driving forces of modern
culture since at least the first half of the nineteenth century.1 The present
volume—which covers Victorian serial fiction from Charles Dickens to
G.W.M. Reynolds, the French feuilleton novel from Eugène Sue to
Ponson du Terrail, American newspaper and magazine fiction from Susan
Warner to E.D.E.N. Southworth, and city mystery novels from Sue and
Reynolds to George Lippard and George Thompson—demonstrates that
much of what scholars take for granted as central features of current serial

1
See Okker, Transnationalism; Phegley, Barton, Huston; Allen and van den Berg; Kelleter,
“Populäre Serialität.” On the serial magazine culture of the late-eighteenth and early nine-
teenth-centuries, which preceded the period covered in the present volume, see Gardner,
Rise and Fall.

D. Stein (*) • L. Wiele

Department of English, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
e-mail: stein@anglistik.uni-siegen.de; wiele@anglistik.uni-siegen.de

© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. Stein, L. Wiele (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in
Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s, Palgrave Studies in
Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15895-8_1
2 D. STEIN AND L. WIELE

storytelling can be traced back to the time between the 1830s and
the 1860s.2
Christoph Lindner notes in his foreword to Serialization in Popular
Culture: “Serialization is an endemic feature of our twenty-first century,
hyper-mediated world”; it “has achieved new levels of cultural embedding
and new forms of technologized expression” (ix). Lindner is certainly cor-
rect. Yet, as we can see from the work we feature in the present volume,
the “logic of the serial” and the “drive to serialize” (ix) that shape much
of what we now recognize as modern mass-mediated popular culture have
their roots in the middle of the nineteenth century. The 1830s–1860s
constitute the period when new printing techniques enabled the mass
publication and wide dissemination of affordable reading materials, when
literary authorship became a viable profession that included the rise of
“industrial literature” and “fiction factories.”3 It was, too, the era when
reading for pleasure became a popular pastime for increasingly literate and
socially diverse audiences, and when previously predominantly national
print markets became thoroughly internationalized and interconnected.4
Moreover, these four decades mark the time when the term “popular cul-
ture” first appeared.5
The city mystery novels that cropped up in the 1840s represent one
paradigmatic example of a new nexus of mass newspapers, serial narration,
and popular genre formation. In the wake of the unprecedented success of
Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, serialized in the conservative newspa-
per Le Journal des Débats between 1842 and 1843, a great number of city
mysteries appeared across Europe (especially France, Great Britain, and
the German-speaking regions) and the United States. In Great Britain,

2
See Bachleitner, Fiktive Nachrichten; Bachleitner, Anfänge; Hülk; Hughes; Humpherys;
King, Easley, and Morton; Law; Okker, Social Stories; Payne; Price and Belasco; Zboray and
Zboray, Literary Dollars.
3
The term “industrial literature” was coined by the French poet and novelist Charles-
Augustin Sainte-Beuve in the article “La littérature industrielle,” published in La Revue des
Deux Mondes in 1839 (see Hülk in this volume). We take the term “fiction factory” from
Denning; see also Zboray and Zboray’s use of the term in this volume.
4
Our focus on print is not intended to downplay the significance of illustrations and other
forms of visual culture. Several of the contributors to this volume address visual elements,
such as engravings and illustrations, of mid-nineteenth-century serial popular culture. See
also Anderson; Gardner, “Antebellum”; Patterson.
5
Gardner cites two examples from 1853 and 1854 that describe serial newspaper publish-
ing and the serial fictions printed by such newspapers as a new and distinct form of popular
culture (cf. “Antebellum” 43).
 INTRODUCING POPULAR CULTURE—SERIAL CULTURE: SERIAL… 3

G.W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London (1844–1846) became a public

sensation, while George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk
Hall became America’s first bestseller (Reynolds, “Introduction,” vii).
These serialized sensational novels adapted the narrative formulas and
basic storylines of Sue’s roman feuilleton to specific linguistic, regional,
cultural, social, economic, and political contexts, and they translated Sue’s
Parisian setting to places such as Hamburg, Leipzig, London, New York,
Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and San
Francisco, as well as smaller cities such as Lowell and Fitchburg.6 As schol-
ars have recently discovered, even Walt Whitman wrote at least one city
mystery novel, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle: An Autobiography,
which underscores the pervasiveness of the genre on the antebellum liter-
ary market.7
The city mystery novel was perhaps the first transnational and multilin-
gual genre of popular serial fiction (see Stein, “Serial Politics”). Feuilleton
novels such as Les Mystères de Paris created a veritable “mysterymania”
(Crowquill quoted in Chevasco 137), circulating quickly and widely across
national borders and literary traditions by way of imports, translations,
and adaptations.8 As “loud texts,” in Gunter Süß’s terminology (cf. below
162)—that is, as texts that, consciously or unconsciously, put pressure on
the incongruities between majority discourses and the diverging experi-
ences of marginalized individuals or groups by interfering with the official
enunciations of national identity—they entered and reshaped the public
sphere by sensationalizing all aspects of urban life and tying the lived expe-
riences of readers to larger (i.e., municipal, regional, national, transna-
tional) narratives of social exploitation and political corruption. They
depicted spectacular events in spectacular narratives that ushered in the
boulevardization of modern media culture (Hülk, cf. below 56) by
addressing their readers simultaneously as political subjects9 and as

6
On the regional peculiarities of New England city mysteries, see Zboray and Zboray,
“Mysteries”; on German-language mysteries published in the United States, see Stein,
“Transatlantic Politics.” For an extended study of the genre across national borders, see
Knight.
7
See the recent special double issue Walt Whitman’s Newly Discovered “Jack Engle” of the
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. On Whitman’s closeness to the genre, see Ostrowski.
8
On such circulations, see Boggs; Cordell; McGill; Tatlock and Erlin.
9
Cohoon speaks of “serialized citizenship” in her analysis of serial fictions of boyhood
between the 1840s and the 1910s.
4 D. STEIN AND L. WIELE

c­onsumers, often voyeuristic ones, of the pleasures offered by popular

serial entertainment.10
These city mysteries became an integral and active part of what Ronald
J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray refer to as “the transatlantic publish-
ing world” and what Mark W. Turner describes as a “global culture of
seriality” (cf. below 130 and 196), which came to fruition around the
middle of the nineteenth century and evolved into a full-fledged media
world (print and electronic) by the end of the century. This media world,
as Norbert Bachleitner suggests (see below 20), provided orientation and
a sense of certainty in times of political liberalization and increasing social
mobility. It did so in terms of content, telling stories about this changing
world and thus encouraging readers to transfer themselves imaginatively
into this world by identifying with characters and recognizing the verisi-
militude of fictional storyworlds with their own lifeworlds on a daily,
weekly, or monthly basis (depending on the periodicity of a particular
publication). More important, they offered producers and consumers a
format and forum for participating in this media world, either as authors,
editors, or publishers, or as readers who could reflect and comment on
their experiences and could anchor their hopes and anxieties in specific
practices of serial engagement.11
Such serial engagement, as Turner argues in this volume, feeds on a ten-
sion between the new and the familiar, between reliability and surprise, or
repetition and variation, imitation and innovation, in a narrative process
that oscillates between a conservative and a progressive pole (cf. 199).12
Bachleitner further speaks of the feuilleton novel’s backward orientation on
the story level, where narratives frequently revert to stereotypical depictions
of races, classes, and genders and where they frequently use retardation to
preclude the premature conclusion of the narrative, as well as on a contex-
tual level, where their popular—and very often populist—­interventions into
the politics and the social reform designs of the day often manifest a
profound “ambivalence toward progress” (cf. below 46). But then again,
as Tanja Weber (taking a cue from Roger Hagedorn’s seminal essay

10
Cf. Lehuu’s reference to the “spectacle in print” (59) of the US literary culture of the
1840s, which includes not only spectacular content but also spectacular forms of narrative
and publication formats.
11
For a longer version of this argument, see Stein, “Serial Politics.” On serial engagement
in nineteenth-century literature, see Hayward; Okker, Social Stories; Price and Smith.
12
Eco conceives of this tension as a dialectics of repetition and variation (see “Interpreting
Serials”); see also Kelleter, “Five Ways”; Kelleter, “Populäre Serialität.”
 INTRODUCING POPULAR CULTURE—SERIAL CULTURE: SERIAL… 5

on seriality) suggests in this volume, serial storytelling has always been a

central means of popularizing new media and reaching new audiences,
affording it a degree of potential progressivity that, for instance, in David
S. Reynolds’s reading of George Lippard (“Deformance”), may become
subversive.
The chapters in Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational
Perspective collectively argue that popular serial storytelling (fiction and
nonfiction) in the period from the 1830s to the 1860s was a near-­ubiquitous
transnational mode of communication, one that drove and was driven by
technological innovation, shifts in the organization and workings of reading
publics, and the popularizing effects of particular narrative tropes, modes,
and formats. These studies respond to Patricia Okker’s call for “further
research on serial fiction” (Transnationalism 2–3) by covering a broad can-
vas of mid-nineteenth-century serial storytelling, including but also ventur-
ing beyond the city mystery genre by examining short stories, magazine
fiction, abolitionist gift books, household books, travel writing, journalism,
and illustration.13 Moreover, they cover all major forms of serial publication:
newspapers, pamphlet editions, and magazines or miscellanies.
Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative therefore embraces as well as
extends Okker’s largely America-centered focus on serial fictions that
“navigat[e the] local, national, and transnational” and point to the existence
of “a larger transnational community [of authors, publishers, and readers]
dispersed across regional and national borders” (Transnationalism 2).
It does so by considering the popular serial cultures of France, England,
Germany, Austria, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States, expanding the
scope of investigation while maintaining the focus on the intricate inter-
connections among national writing traditions and literary markets that
were becoming more and more transnational at this particular historical
moment. As such, our volume investigates the emergence of a transna-
tional print culture and the workings of an increasingly international mar-
ket for books and periodicals at a crucial point in the formation of popular
culture. It obviously recognizes “the transmedial and transhistorical com-
plexity of the serial in popular culture” (4; emphasis added) that Rob Allen
and Thijs van den Berg diagnose in their introduction to Serialization in

13
The panorama of nineteenth-century popular serial narrative is nicely captured by the
following (albeit incomplete) list provided by Barton and Phegley: “seduction tales, Gothic
fiction, Newgate novels, city-mystery romances, middle-class sensation fiction, […] dime
novels, imperial and frontier adventures, and detective stories” (1).
6 D. STEIN AND L. WIELE

Popular Culture, but it stresses the transnational dimensions of nineteenth-­

century serial storytelling.
Conceptualizing this volume at a time when the transnational turn is
no longer the latest in the series of turns that have changed the landscape
and topography of literary and cultural studies means facing a large num-
ber of existing—and sometimes contradictory—definitions. Instead of
entering into the debate about the nature, shape, and scope of the trans-
national by offering yet another variation of Shelley Fisher Fishin’s defini-
tion of the transnational as “the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping
the work of border-crossing authors, artists, and cultural forms that strad-
dle multiple regional and national traditions” (32), we want to frame the
chapters that follow with Christof Decker and Astrid Böger’s useful
thoughts on the transnational element in popular culture. Decker and
Böger suggest that the transnational

relates to physical, virtual, imaginative, and even imaginary practices of

crossing national boundaries and borders. Transnational encounters of peo-
ple, places, objects, technologies, institutions, styles, stars, narratives, genres,
images, art forms, and more […] presuppose a notion of national origin, yet
this notion is constantly renegotiated and reconfigured in the act of border-­
crossing. Investigating these acts of “transnational mediations” allows us to
understand their form and logic as instances of imitation, emulation, adapta-
tion, reworking, translation, resistance, or negotiation thus going beyond
traditional notions of cultural imperialism, dominance, or subordi-
nation. (8)14

Conspicuously absent from this otherwise spot-on list of transnational

mediations are the serial aesthetics and practices through which many
transnational encounters take shape. The chapters here identify these serial
aesthetics and practices and trace the transnational renegotiations and
reconfigurations of the national. Rather than attempt to do justice to the
varieties of popular serial narration on a transnational (or perhaps even a
global scale), they mainly focus on the transatlantic world by investigating
the circulation of serial narrative in Europe (France, England, the German-­
speaking regions) as well as the United States, with case studies on Brazil
and Turkey gesturing toward the existence of nineteenth-century serial

14
Tatlock and Erlin understand “reception, adaptation, and transformation” as the hall-
marks of nineteenth-century transatlantic cultural transfer (here: between Germany and the
United States) (German Culture, subtitle).
 INTRODUCING POPULAR CULTURE—SERIAL CULTURE: SERIAL… 7

cultures in other parts of the globe.15 Despite this obvious limitation, the
work assembled here illuminates a number of blind spots on the transna-
tional map of nineteenth-century serial narrative, uncovering, for instance,
the seriality of Boston-based abolitionist gift books and the budding peri-
odical culture of Brazil, the satirical thrust of the Austrian feuilleton novel,
and the boulevardization of the popular press in France. In this way, the
volume contributes to Franco Moretti’s project of mapping a “geography
of literature” by tracing the “diffusion” of “literature in space” and
“enlarg[ing …] the literary field” (Atlas 3, 5), recognizing the inherent
connection between the “place-bound nature of literary forms” and the
“internal logic of narrative” (5).
Instead of embracing Moretti’s methodology of “distant reading” (see
“Conjectures”), however, our contributors take different approaches and
utilize a number of methodologies to make their cases: from contextual-
ized close readings (Grumbrecht, Süß, Göritz) to genre and media analy-
sis (Bachleitner, Hülk, Wiegmink, Weber), to topical/thematic
investigation (Glaubitz, Steinhoff, Wiele, Stein) and the study of publish-
ing institutions (Musser, Turner), to biographical (Zboray and Zboray)
and transcultural approaches (Tutumlu and Serdar, Groß).16 In doing so,
they recover slices of what Pascale Casanova has called the “lost transna-
tional dimension” of the “world republic of letters,” and they largely sub-
stantiate the assertion that the “literature-world” of the mid-nineteenth
century was structured into dominating and dominated regions, or liter-
ary centers and peripheries—even though these relations were in constant
flux. Examples include Ricarda Musser’s study of Brazilian literary cul-
ture’s initial dependency on French literature and the gaze on Paris as the
center of literary activities, Matthias Göritz’s reading of Heinrich
Börnstein’s Mysteries of St. Louis as an American adaptation (city mystery)
of a French form (the roman feuilleton) written in German by a German
immigrant for German-American as well as English-speaking readers (a
translation soon followed the German edition), and Reyhan Tutumlu and
Ali Serdar’s suggestion that quite a number of English serial novels entered

15
Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia certainly warrant their own studies of nine-
teenth-century popular serial narration. The feuilleton novel, for instance, was also a popular
phenomenon in Japan. For analysis, see Law and Morita.
16
Only the chapter by Tutumlu and Serdar utilizes Moretti’s methodology; Turner’s chap-
ter considers a large quantity of texts but ultimately concentrates on the textual proliferation
of The Mysteries of London. For an application of distant reading techniques to nineteenth-
century literature, see Erlin and Tatlock.
8 D. STEIN AND L. WIELE

the Ottoman Empire via Turkish translations of abbreviated French trans-

lations of the original English texts.17 We therefore believe that this vol-
ume’s necessary lack of comprehensiveness—due in part to the disciplinary
training and research interests of our contributors and in part to the diver-
sity and vastness of popular serial narrative on a global scale—is compen-
sated by a gain in cohesiveness, as the work collected here underscores the
centrality of key authors, texts, and serial practices across national borders.
Sue’s Mystères de Paris and Reynolds’s Mysteries of London appear as cor-
nerstones of transatlantic serial narrative and beyond, for instance, while
Christopher Looby’s concept of the “local paratext” (186)—the material
immediately surrounding individual serial narratives in the space of the
newspaper—orients several of the analyses to follow.
If newspapers, pamphlets, and magazines, as the prime carrier media of
the time, struggled to negotiate the tension between the increasing frag-
mentation of what had previously been conceived as monolithic cultures
into a multitude of competing cultures in a move from the national to the
transnational, it makes sense to analyze the “specific encounters between
bounded wholes and network sprawl” (Levine 117). Focusing on such
specific encounters is vital because of the “unruliness” (a concept proposed
by Turner) of nineteenth-century print seriality, which problematizes any
“effort at totalization” (Humpherys 125) and undermines any secure sense
of national unity or cohesion.18 In his contribution to this volume, Turner
thus points to the essential “futility of totalization” and redirects our atten-
tion to specific moments of serial engagement determined by a dialectics of
an inexhaustible variety of “serial patterns” and their attending “mecha-
nisms of containment”—a dialectics encapsulated by the notion of an inter-
dependent “abundance and limitation” inherent in nineteenth-century
popular serial culture (and beyond) (201, 196, 205, 209).
For these reasons, and emerging from our own work in the field of
seriality studies, we embrace the notion of the network as an organizing
metaphor for this volume.19 The network metaphor allows us to conceive

17
Translation is, of course, a crucial factor in the transnational spread of popular serial lit-
erature. As Casanova remarks, “[t]ranslation, despite the inevitable misunderstandings to
which it gives rise, is one of the principal means by which texts circulate in the literary world”
(xiii).
18
This unruliness is captured in Lehuu’s description of antebellum literature as a “carnival
on the page” and in Stewart’s notion of “reading and disorder” in antebellum America.
19
For an Actor-Network-based take on popular serial storytelling, see Kelleter, “Five
Ways.” On networks in the context of digital approaches, see Alfano and Stauffer; Cordell.
 INTRODUCING POPULAR CULTURE—SERIAL CULTURE: SERIAL… 9

of a transatlantic (and now certainly global) infrastructure through which

serialized print publications circulated in many directions, often simulta-
neously and with great speed, and which supported the emergence and
evolution of specific serial aesthetics and practices. In a similar vein, Okker
notes that “circulation—the flow of ideas, currencies, goods, and even
people across various borders—is a key issue within transnational studies”
(Transnational 6), while Ryan Cordell has recently advanced the notion
of a “network author” in the culture of reprinting and circulation of mate-
rials in antebellum newspapers.20 To think of mid-nineteenth-century
popular culture as a transnational network that enables, and is supported
by, serial circulation, allows us to discern a wide, and ultimately unfathom-
able, horizon of serial possibilities while focusing on particular manifesta-
tions in the form of individual authors, editors, publishers, as well as texts,
genres, and media and their recipients that can be conceived of as “nodes
on the network of print,” as Turner suggests below (205).
Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative is divided into three parts. Part I
examines the central starting point of the transnational spread of popular
serial narration in the 1830s and 1840s. The individual chapters move
from close examinations of the trendsetting French feuilleton novel and
the culture from which it sprang to its adaptations across Europe (exem-
plified by the German-speaking regions) to South America (exemplified by
the case of Brazil) and, with a temporal lag, to Turkey. As all of the chap-
ters indicate, popular serial storytelling at this time not only relied on
more or less similar technological and institutional preconditions, but it
also thrived in particular socio-economic environments and cultural con-
stellations that include modernization, industrialization, urbanization,
capitalism, and sweeping demographic change.
The chapters in Part II concentrate on the American antebellum era
and consider the impact of specific authors, editors, publishers, press laws

On the more general significance of network theory for recent American Studies, see
Reichhardt, Schäfer, and Schober.
20
Cordell writes: “The composition and circulation of texts among antebellum newspapers
offers a model of authorship that is communal rather than individual, distributed rather than
centralized. I propose that an idea of the ‘network author’ accounts for the ways in which
meaning and authority accrued to acts of circulation and aggregation across antebellum
newspapers. This idea of a network-author extends scholarly notions of reprinting, reauthor-
ship, and the social text by identifying composition in terms of writers, editors, compositors,
and readers enmeshed in reciprocal, mutually dynamic relationships of reception, interpreta-
tion, and remediation” (417). On the “culture of reprinting” at mid-century, see McGill.
10 D. STEIN AND L. WIELE

(including censorship), and literary institutions—the “print hubs” that,

according to Turner’s chapter in this volume, function as nodes in the
transnational network of media technologies, new forms of transporta-
tion, and new institutions of serial communication (209; cf. 193). The
contributions move from an interest in the transnational German-American
personal history and outlook of the powerful publisher Frederick Gleason
to the function of gift books as an understudied serial format that enabled
the creation of gendered networks of transnational abolitionist activism.
They branch out to the “loud” transnational politics of a serial bestseller
(Southworth’s The Hidden Hand) and the intersection of statistical prac-
tices with the emerging transnational popular genre of crime fiction (e.g.,
Edgar Allan Poe’s Mystery of Marie Rogêt and Thomas De Quincey’s “On
Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”).
Part III turns to the Anglo-American city mystery novel, reading repre-
sentatives of the genre as adaptations of the French feuilleton novel that
not only increase its transnational scope but also modify and insert it into
the print cultures of Victorian England and the antebellum United States.
The chapters further analyze the treatment of a broad range of socio-­
politically and culturally significant issues in a number of city mystery nov-
els by authors such as G.W.M. Reynolds, George Thompson, Osgood
Bradbury, George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Heinrich Börnstein, Emil
Klauprecht, and Ludwig von Reizenstein, as well as the city reportage of
George G. Foster. Among these issues are conflicted depictions of gender
and sexuality, of race and ethnicity, of media and mediation, and of the
rapidly changing worlds of the modern city (geography, architecture, pub-
lic spectacle, social transformation). Finally, several chapters in Part III
examine the significance of the city mystery genre in the creation of trans-
national immigrant identities and the project of American nation-building
at a critical moment in United States history, when, as Matthias Göritz
notes in his analysis of a particularly dramatic scene in Heinrich Börnstein’s
Geheimnisse von St. Louis (Mysteries of St. Louis) that imagines of Catholic
takeover of government, America was not only in flux but would soon be
up in flames (cf. 284).
In our role as editors, we cannot ignore that our scholarship and the
research of our contributors has more political currency than we might
have originally assumed when we conceived of the project that started our
inquiry into processes of serial politicization in antebellum city mysteries
and when we conceived of the conference that first brought together the
 INTRODUCING POPULAR CULTURE—SERIAL CULTURE: SERIAL… 11

different perspectives featured here.21 As talk of “fake news,” “alternative

facts,” and a “postfactual era” dominate the headlines as we write these
lines, and as nativist and nationalist tendencies threaten to eradicate (or at
least undermine) the more cosmopolitan worldviews in Europe and the
United States that several of our contributors discern in their materials, we
are reminded of Shelley Streeby’s notion of the antebellum era as a media-­
crossing and politically volatile “culture of sensation.” It is perhaps no
coincidence that the timeframe of our investigation—the 1830s to the
1860s—centers on the year 1848, when revolutions across Europe chal-
lenged the old feudal systems and when Americans clashed (eventually
violently) over basic understandings of class, race, and gender, as well
as the nation’s self-conception as an internally divided aspiring empire.22
In this culture of sensation, virtually everything was politicized, and
factual reporting and fictional dramatization became increasingly difficult,
if not impossible, to distinguish. If the kind of popular serial fiction that
could reach large audiences and impact local, regional, national, and even
transnational “structures of feeling”23 originated in the medium of the
cheap mass newspaper, then it is no surprise that the novel and the news,
fiction and reportage, draw on similar rhetorical strategies, latch onto the
same issues and events, and frequently overlap across the famous
Feuilletonstrich—the dividing line that ostensibly separates fact (above)
from fiction (below). We cannot and do not claim that Nineteenth-Century
Serial Narrative offers a historiography of the current (and apparently
globally proliferating) conflation of populist agitation and popular culture,
and we certainly acknowledge that the digital turn may not only have exac-
erbated but also fundamentally changed the parameters of serial political
engagement. We do, however, want to suggest that looking back to the era
in which modern popular media culture emerged as a highly ­politicized,

21
“Serial Politicization: On the Cultural Work of American City Mysteries, 1844–1860,”
funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Research Unit “Popular Seriality—
Aesthetics and Practice” between 2013 and 2017; “Popular Culture—Serial Culture:
Nineteenth-Century Serial Fictions in Transnational Perspective, 1830s–1860s,” University
of Siegen, 28–30 April 2016.
22
Rogin coins the phrase “the American 48” to describe a transatlantic moment of political
upheaval (103). For further analysis, see Streeby.
23
See Hendler’s application of Raymond Williams’s concept to nineteenth-century
American literature. Meer’s analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a transmedial and transatlantic
phenomenon provides a compelling case study of such structures of feeling across national
boundaries.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ROMANCE SONÁMBULO

Verde que te quiero verde.

Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura,
ella sueña en su baranda
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Bajo la luna gitana,
las cosas la están mirando
y ella no puede mirarlas.

Verde que te quiero verde.

Grandes estrellas de escarcha,
vienen con el pez de sombra
que abre el camino del alba.
La higuera frota su viento
con la lija de sus ramas,
y el monte, gato garduño,
eriza sus pitas agrias.
¿Pero quién vendrá? ¿Y por dónde?...
Ella sigue en su baranda
verde carne, pelo verde,
soñando en la mar amarga.

Compadre, quiero cambiar,

mi caballo por su casa,
mi montura por su espejo,
mi cuchillo por su manta.
Compadre, vengo sangrando,
desde los puertos de Cabra.
Si yo pudiera, mocito,
este trato se cerraba.
Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
Compadre, quiero morir
decentemente en mi cama.
De acero, si puede ser,
con las sábanas de holanda.
¿No ves la herida que tengo
desde el pecho a la garganta?
Trescientas rosas morenas
lleva tu pechera blanca.
Tu sangre rezuma y huele
alrededor de tu faja.
Pero yo ya no soy yo.
Ni mi casa es ya mi casa.
Dejadme subir al menos
hasta las altas barandas,
¡dejadme subir!, dejadme
hasta las verdes barandas.
Barandales de la luna
por donde retumba el agua.

Ya suben los dos compadres

hacia las altas barandas.
Dejando un rastro de sangre.
Dejando un rastro de lágrimas.
Temblaban en los tejados
farolillos de hojalata.
Mil panderos de cristal,
herían la madrugada.

Verde que te quiero verde,

verde viento, verdes ramas.
Los dos compadres subieron.
El largo viento, dejaba
en la boca un raro gusto
de hiel, de menta y de albahaca.
¡Compadre! ¿Dónde está, dime?
¿Dónde está tu niña amarga?
¡Cuántas veces te esperó!
¡Cuántas veces te esperara
cara fresca, negro pelo,
en esta verde baranda!

Sobre el rostro del aljibe,

se mecía la gitana.
Verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.
Un carámbano de luna,
la sostiene sobre el agua.
La noche se puso íntima
como una pequeña plaza.
Guardias civiles borrachos,
en la puerta golpeaban.
Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar.
Y el caballo en la montaña.
 5
LA MONJA GITANA

A José Moreno Villa.

LA MONJA GITANA

Silencio de cal y mirto.

Malvas en las hierbas finas.
La monja borda alhelíes
sobre una tela pajiza.
Vuelan en la araña gris,
siete pájaros del prisma.
La iglesia gruñe a lo lejos
como un oso panza arriba.
¡Qué bien borda! ¡Con qué gracia!
Sobre la tela pajiza,
ella quisiera bordar
flores de su fantasía.
¡Qué girasol! ¡Qué magnolia
de lentejuelas y cintas!
¡Qué azafranes y qué lunas,
en el mantel de la misa!
Cinco toronjas se endulzan
en la cercana cocina.
Las cinco llagas de Cristo
cortadas en Almería.
Por los ojos de la monja
galopan dos caballistas.
Un rumor último y sordo
le despega la camisa,
y al mirar nubes y montes
en las yertas lejanías,
se quiebra su corazón
de azúcar y yerbaluisa.
¡Oh!, qué llanura empinada
con veinte soles arriba.
¡Qué ríos puestos de pie
vislumbra su fantasía!
Pero sigue con sus flores,
mientras que de pie, en la brisa,
la luz juega el ajedrez
alto de la celosía.
 6
LA CASADA INFIEL

A Lydia Cabrera y a su negrita.

LA CASADA INFIEL

Y que yo me la llevé al río

creyendo que era mozuela,
pero tenía marido.
Fue la noche de Santiago
y casi por compromiso.
Se apagaron los faroles
y se encendieron los grillos.
En las últimas esquinas
toqué sus pechos dormidos,
y se me abrieron de pronto
como ramos de jacintos.
El almidón de su enagua
me sonaba en el oído,
como una pieza de seda
rasgada por diez cuchillos.
Sin luz de plata en sus copas
los árboles han crecido
y un horizonte de perros
ladra muy lejos del río.
 •

Pasadas las zarzamoras,

los juncos y los espinos,
bajo su mata de pelo
hice un hoyo sobre el limo.
Yo me quité la corbata.
Ella se quitó el vestido.
Yo el cinturón con revólver.
Ella sus cuatro corpiños.
Ni nardos ni caracolas
tienen el cutis tan fino,
ni los cristales con luna
relumbran con ese brillo.
Sus muslos se me escapaban
como peces sorprendidos,
la mitad llenos de lumbre,
la mitad llenos de frío.
Aquella noche corrí
el mejor de los caminos,
montado en potra de nácar
sin bridas y sin estribos.
No quiero decir, por hombre,
las cosas que ella me dijo.
La luz del entendimiento
me hace ser muy comedido.
Sucia de besos y arena
yo me la llevé del río.
Con el aire se batían
las espadas de los lirios.

Me porté como quien soy.

Como un gitano legítimo.
La regalé un costurero
grande de raso pajizo,
y no quise enamorarme
porque teniendo marido
me dijo que era mozuela
cuando la llevaba al río.
 7
ROMANCE DE LA PENA NEGRA

A José Navarro Pardo.

ROMANCE DE LA PENA NEGRA

Las piquetas de los gallos

cavan buscando la aurora,
cuando por el monte oscuro
baja Soledad Montoya.
Cobre amarillo, su carne,
huele a caballo y a sombra.
Yunques ahumados sus pechos,
gimen canciones redondas.
Soledad: ¿por quién preguntas
sin compaña y a estas horas?
Pregunte por quien pregunte,
dime: ¿a ti qué se te importa?
Vengo a buscar lo que busco,
mi alegría y mi persona.
Soledad de mis pesares,
caballo que se desboca,
al fin encuentra la mar
y se lo tragan las olas.
No me recuerdes el mar
que la pena negra brota
en las tierras de aceituna
bajo el rumor de las hojas.
¡Soledad, qué pena tienes!
¡Qué pena tan lastimosa!
Lloras zumo de limón
agrio de espera y de boca.
¡Qué pena tan grande! Corro
mi casa como una loca,
mis dos trenzas por el suelo
de la cocina a la alcoba.
¡Qué pena! Me estoy poniendo
de azabache, carne y ropa.
¡Ay mis camisas de hilo!
¡Ay mis muslos de amapola!
Soledad: lava tu cuerpo
con agua de las alondras,
y deja tu corazón
en paz, Soledad Montoya.

Por abajo canta el río:

volante de cielo y hojas.
Con flores de calabaza,
la nueva luz se corona.
¡Oh pena de los gitanos!
Pena limpia y siempre sola.
¡Oh pena de cauce oculto
y madrugada remota!
 8
SAN MIGUEL
(GRANADA)

A Diego Buigas de Dalmáu.

 SAN MIGUEL

Se ven desde las barandas,

por el monte, monte, monte,
mulos y sombras de mulos
cargados de girasoles.

Sus ojos en las umbrías

se empañan de inmensa noche.
En los recodos del aire,
cruje la aurora salobre.

Un cielo de mulos blancos

cierra sus ojos de azogue
dando a la quieta penumbra
un final de corazones.
Y el agua se pone fría
para que nadie la toque.
Agua loca y descubierta
por el monte, monte, monte.

•
 San Miguel lleno de encajes
en la alcoba de su torre,
enseña sus bellos muslos
ceñidos por los faroles.

Arcángel domesticado
en el gesto de las doce,
finge una cólera dulce
de plumas y ruiseñores.
San Miguel canta en los vidrios;
Efebo de tres mil noches,
fragante de agua colonia
y lejano de las flores.

El mar baila por la playa,

un poema de balcones.
Las orillas de la luna
pierden juncos, ganan voces.
Vienen manolas comiendo
semillas de girasoles,
los culos grandes y ocultos
como planetas de cobre.
Vienen altos caballeros
y damas de triste porte,
morenas por la nostalgia
de un ayer de ruiseñores.
Y el obispo de Manila
ciego de azafrán y pobre,
dice misa con dos filos
para mujeres y hombres.

San Miguel se estaba quieto

en la alcoba de su torre,
con las enaguas cuajadas
de espejitos y entredoses.

San Miguel, rey de los globos

y de los números nones,
en el primor berberisco
de gritos y miradores.