Serial Time and Finance Capital in Anthony Trollope and HBO's Succession

Abstract

Abstract Global Anglophone culture of the twenty-first century has seen a popular resurgence of serialized fiction not witnessed since the English-language apogee of the Victorian serialized novel, as embodied in the monthly packets of chapters published by Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and others. This time around, it is weekly televisual and streaming installments that debut the eagerly awaited episodes and seasons of our culture's most influential long-format narratives. Despite any residual disrespect for television/streaming as a cultural medium, this transposition of serial narratives from print to screen does not always entail a reduction or simplification of fictive narratives’ literary capacity for implicit socioeconomic critique, or for subtle and illuminative registers of the era's political unconscious. There is no Anglophone televisual series of the 2020s that better illustrates the potential of long-format streaming narrative to parallel the critical power of the best Victorian serial novels than showrunner Jesse Armstrong's Succession (HBO, 2018 – 23). The aim of this essay is to ground an interpretation of Succession in the thematic and formal homologies that it shares with the best nineteenth-century serial novels in general, and Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1873 – 74) in particular.