William Dean Howells's Periodical Time American novels were commonplace in nineteenth-century periodicals. Regularly serialized, extracted, reviewed, and advertised, they even appeared as whole works in Brother Jonathan in the 1840s and Lippincott's Monthly in the 1880s and 90s. The periodical's flexible form allowed novels to be literary content, objects of discussion, and products for sale. Novels proved less hospitable in return. Restricted to the stuff of content, periodicals had to compete with other subject matter for visibility. They appear as material objects, like The Pickwick Portfolio that the March sisters spend rainy days producing in Little Women (1868). They become markers of cultural distinction in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), when Holgrave tells Phoebe Pyncheon that he has written for Graham's Magazine and Godey's Lady's Book, and provide financial security in the second half of Ruth Hall (1855) when the heroine becomes a successful weekly columnist. Periodicals employ minor characters in major novels-such as Henrietta Stackpole in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and Matthias Pardon in The Bostonians (1886); major characters in minor novels, such as Myles Manning in Kirk Munroe's Under Orders (1890); and occasionally, as in the case of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors (1903), major characters in major novels. 1 Novels did not ignore the periodical, then, but only rarely does a periodical itself become the major protagonist in a nineteenthcentury novel. William Dean Howell's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) is one such instance. 2 The result of the novel's uncommon preoccupation with the periodical is a study of seriality and temporality that brings into focus questions that have separately occupied nineteenthcentury literary studies: What constitutes periodical time? And how does extraliterary time manifest itself in literary form and content? By offering a new answer to the first of these questions, this essay offers a new answer to the second. My understanding of periodical time comprises two elements: the human time of 2 periodical labor and the paradoxical nature of periodical temporality. By 1914 periodicals accounted for 99 percent of the fourteen billion books, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines American printers turned out each year; expanding markets and new advertising revenues rapidly increased the periodical share of publishing industry value (Census of Manufactures, 644, 648). 3 Tens of thousands of people turned raw materials into periodical objects through machine, paper, and ink making, type founding and typesetting, and dozens of other ancillary trades. Current understandings of periodical time ignore this activity and focus instead on how finished periodical objects embody and represent changing nineteenth-century timescapes. 4But the scale, ubiquity, and significance of periodical production meant that the rhythms of periodical time were first established in the pre-publication and pre-consumption phases of a print world working "day and night, week in and week out" ...
