Or we might consider Benedict Anderson’s argument that serial time creates the sense of a continuous present, where individuals participate in a nation that moves backwards and forwards in time. We might argue that serial form brings what Fredric Jameson calls existential time into the everyday, individualized existence of the single human. Trollope works through the problems of serial form, which creates a structure of continuity across time, particularly in his series of novels, as he confronts the reality of his own death.

It’s important, then, that the novel grapples with the painful realization of seriality’s closure. It was published serially in Blackwood’s Magazine, which turned 65 years old in April the year The Fixed Period was published. Published in 1882, the novel came out in when Trollope was 67 himself (he died later that year).

In Trollope’s The Fixed Period, Britannula imagines a society in which individuals accept a standardized end to their life in the interest of society. Whereas serial publication creates the sense of continuity across time, partly in its perpetual deferral of closure, these novels self-consciously put their serial installments into tension with the temporalities offered by the utopian/dystopian worlds in the text. This means that readers encounter a totalized world, one dramatically different from their own, through serial form that has been recognized for making fictional worlds more dramatically part of the readers’ world. The late nineteenth century saw a number of utopian and anti-utopian writings that were published serially.

This paper will examine the apparent incongruities of serial publication and utopian/dystopian fiction, with a focus on Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period. The concept of utopia seems temporally incompatible with serial form: after all, utopias involve an imaginative, radical break with the past, a dramatic contrast to the continuity of serial publication. Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Annual Conference, 2018 How to Cite?

The fixed period by anthony trollope