I have chosen to concentrate on one period of one national literature, the years 1907-1936 in Spain, during which a large number of periodical publications were dedicated to complete literary, fictional texts (novels, novellas, long short stories, plays) to the exclusion of any other material, except some publicity. In this period, I have singled out one collection, "La Novela Rosa," and, in this collection, focused on the works of one author, Rafael Pérez y Pérez, because of his success (over 4 million copies sold), enormous output (131 titles, of which 39 are in "La Novela Rosa") and longevity (he was active for 56 years, from 1915 to 1971). With all that, it is not possible to be exhaustive.
After a brief examination of the intellectual and economic scene in which the phenomenon of the periodical narrative developed, I shall address myself to two main questions: the possible effect of periodical publication on reading expectations, with the correlative fixation of generic rules and boundaries; and the structural and ideological relation-ship between repetition at collection scale, features of individual issues and a psycho-social compulsion of repetition. In view of the inaccessibility of many texts and the practical impossibility of documenting contemporary readers' response, the present study is admittedly highly speculative and cannot rely on or aspire to empirical verification; its aim is to air certain theoretical concepts belonging to an integral theory of narrative communication and to confront them with a special case in which ordinary text delimitation is clearly not tenable. Moreover,the phenomenon of the periodical narrative was not confined to Spain in the 1920's and 1930's. (57)