Catherine Waters argues that the growth of London, and the proliferation of cheap periodicals, particularly after the repeal of the newspaper stamp tax in 1855, generated a new form of ‘metropolitan travel writing’ representing ‘the lived rhythms of urban experience that is a distinctive development in the print culture of the 1850s’. Dickens’s Household Words, launched in 1850, published graphic sketches of city life that provided readers with a vivid experience of imaginary flânerie. This chapter is concerned with George Augustus Sala, a protégé of Dickens, whose 1858 serialised account of a day in London for The Welcome Guest – ‘Twice Round the Clock’ – deploys its serial form to map the temporal geography of the metropolis with an appealing blend of reporting and storytelling.

As one of the inventors of the twelve-tone technique and the first well-known composer of twelve-tone music, it makes eminent sense that Arnold Schoenberg would be understood by scholars and musicians as a traditionalist. This chapter explores an important, but often neglected, way Schoenberg preserved tradition in his serial music: through the use of a ‘musical idea’ that involves the introduction and elaboration of a problem and its eventual solution. The chapter presents two analyses: of the Prelude op. 25 and the Piano Piece op. 33a. Both pieces illustrate problems and elaborations that stem from the differences between a symmetrical pitch-class or interval pattern (presented or implied at the beginning) and various close or distant approximations of it. The symmetrical pattern is then reasserted at or near the end, and the approximations are connected to it in significant ways, as a solution.

While the ‘post-serial’ has been a resilient critical category over more than half a century, its status remains problematised by ongoing debates around the nature and limits of the serial itself. In particular, as insight grows into European serial practice after World War II, so does the case for understanding serialism as a more capacious concept than hitherto, embracing not only technique but also aesthetic and – a category regarded as taboo by certain of its practitioners – style. The generalisations that serialism underwent in the 1950s led less to a rigidly deterministic model of ‘total’ serialism than to a proliferation of the concept in many directions. Its seemingly endless possibilities of permutation led it (surprisingly to some) towards the statistical and the aleatory, while its notion of the ‘parameter’ went at times beyond the conventional categories of pitch and rhythm to embrace the manipulation of text, action and gesture. If relatively few composers now profess an overt allegiance to serialism, fewer still can entirely avoid the explicit reflections on material and process that it stimulated.

Histories of dissolving high/low culture divides inform Katalin Orbán’s discussion of contemporary graphic fiction, as she posits the critical and popular emergence of long-form, verbal-visual works that push narrative conventions in new directions, such as spatial-temporal experiments (e.g., by Chris Ware and Richard McGuire), the use of visual metaphors and other conventionally linguistic literary devices, and genre blurring distinctive to the drawn medium.