> our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feu

> our nineteen-century three-volume encyclopedic novels Many of which were originally serials published in newspapers ... see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton - Herman Hesse, for one, griped about the "age of the feuilleton". Gore Vidal, who for a while earned his living writing for TV and movies, used to argue that the post-1960 emphasis on film directors was misplaced, and that writers actually were the essential factor. But he also remarked that pretty soon speaking of a famous writer would be like speaking of a famous ceramicist. Curiously, some of the recente movie/TV series are putting directors back in the hired-hand category that Vidal said was their place, and emphasizing producers-writers, e.g. Game of Thrones. (People like tales, like continued tales with familiar characters, like having some sort of tag to identify what they're picking - an author name is best, and sometimes it is fake, as in "house names" used by publishers as a brand for stories actually produced by a stable of multiple writers. Which is not new either ...)