Ryan Engley, "Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the

dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print

culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one.

The serial

is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of

an ongoing narrative—from installments of Victorian novels to TV

episodes to comic books—seriality names the spread of installment-based

storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that

seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic

structure. Seriality—in its dependence on gaps, delay, and

constraint—names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there

exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is