Robyn R. Warhol

Making `gay' and `lesbian' into household words: How serial form works in Armistead Maupin's

~T _ ales of the City, Armistead Maupins fictitious chronicle of gay, straight, lesbian, and bisexual life in San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, was the first-and arguably the most successful-of the late-twentiethcentury best-selling novels to be published in serial installments.1 Many genres of contemporary popular fiction deploy serial form (by which I mean the publication or broadcast and reception of a continuous fictional narrative in parts), including science fiction, detective novels, Westerns, maritime adventure novels, Hollywood movies with sequels, and even television commercials for long-distance phone companies or Tasters Choice coffee. Indeed, a significant portion of the narratives that circulate in mainstream popular culture today get composed and transmitted in parts, such as celebritycentered news stories (the life and death of Princess Diana, or the continuing saga of Elizabeth Taylors marriages and divorces, or the aftermath of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, for instance), or the kind of serially published documentaries that appear regularly in

The Engaging Narrator

Reply to Warhol, Robyn R. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA. 1986 Oct; 101(5): 811-18.