Political events strongly influenced the plots of serialized magazine novels, as writers incorporated current events of the day in their stories to reflect on contentious issues and potentiailly lay new ground for debate.
One of the earliest serialized fiction novels, Jeremy Belknap's The Foresters, directly addressed the issue of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the colonies' boundary disputes. But the issue that dominated nineteenth-century American serial fiction was the Civil War: From the best known of all serial novels, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, through to magazine novels published into the late nineteenth century, the Civil War and its attendant concerns of slavery, abolitionism, and Reconstruction were rich material that numerous authors mined to express their perspectives on the controversial issues. These stories often were in sync with the editorial sensiblity of the publication itself, from the abolitionist leanings of National Era which published Uncle Tom's Cabin, to the Confederacy defense mounted in Southern Magazine and the fierce North-South debates that filled the pages of Century magazine.
Other issues of note that were addressed through serial fiction include suffrage, the labor conditions of mill workers, and political corruption. Politically-oriented serial fiction was also called "realist fiction," and some of the better-known writers of the era included William Gilmore Simms, Martin R. Delany (of the novel Blake, the first African-American magazine novel), and Rebecca Harding Davis.
Many of the stories in the Farm, Field, and Fireside collection address political aspects of the agricultural industry, immigrant labor, populism, and suffrage.
Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Gunning, Sandra. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
