This material and theoretical history of seriality shows it to be the dominant form of culture since its inception within 19th-century print culture, as both a media structure and a psychic one. The serial is everywhere. Commonly identified by the segmented release structure of an ongoing narrative – from installments of Victorian novels to TV episodes to comic books – seriality names the spread of installment-based storytelling across a range of media. However, Ryan Engley argues that seriality is not only a narrative structure but also a psychic structure. Seriality – in its dependence on gaps, delay, and constraint – names the fundamental trauma of contemporary life: that there exists an intrinsic relation between self and other, a relation that is often difficult to see and difficult to bear. Through formal readings of media texts alongside Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the dialectical method of G.W.F. Hegel, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, Seriality: Media and the Psychic Form of Everyday Life shifts the focus of seriality studies. In so doing, Engley presents a rebuttal to the common refrain that our lives, like contemporary media, have become endlessly fragmented. Rather, Engley finds, we have become radically – serially – connected. “Ryan Engley offers a revelatory theory of how serial media forms engage existential and even political realities. Highly original in its scope and insightful about both art forms and psychoanalytic philosophy, this compelling work is a must-teach for contemporary cultural studies.” ― Anna Kornbluh, Professor of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA Ryan Engley is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, USA, where he teaches and researches the intersection of psychoanalytic theory and media studies. Along with Todd McGowan, Engley co-hosts the podcast Why Theory , which brings Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine contemporary phenomena. Peter L. Rudnytsky is Professor of English at the University of Florida as well as Head of the Department of Academic and Professional Affairs and Chair of the Committee on Confidentiality of the American Psychoanalytic Association. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the editor of American Imago . A coeditor of the Psychoanalytic Horizons series and editor of the History of Psychoanalysis series for Routledge, Rudnytsky is the author of books from Freud and Oedipus (1987) to Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rank, Ferenczi, Groddeck (2002), for which he received the Gradiva Award, and Mutual Analysis: Ferenczi, Severn, and the Origins of Trauma Theory (2022). He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Gainesville. Hilary Neroni is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Vermont, USA. She is the author of Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Bloomsbury, 2016), The Subject of Torture (2015), and The Violent Woman (2005) and has also published numerous essays on film and theory.