When Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2013) appeared fourteen years after Helen Fielding’s second Bridget Jones novel, even Fielding’s most loyal readers likely had mixed feelings: excitement to recover a beloved character and her engaging comic voice tempered by trepidation that the recovery would be incomplete, that this third novel would not meet expectations created by Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), as some already felt Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999) had not. When readers learned, many through advance press coverage, that the Bridget of this third novel is a widow and that her great love, Mark Darcy, is dead, trepidation perhaps threatened to overcome excitement: a novel about a devastated Bridget Jones was hard to imagine. However, readers’ fears that Bridgetmay have been rendered unrecognizable by what she has gone through are quickly dispelled: Fielding reassures her audience that we are encountering a familiar protagonist in a still familiar fictional world, and she does this especially through her deployment of what I call suspended seriality. A suspended sequel is a novel in a series that appears after considerable real time and story time have elapsed. Such a sequel depends on many of our expectations for seriality even as it disrupts others, especially regarding time. With seriality studies focusing strongly on nineteenth-century periodicals and also on comics, television, and digital narratives, the timing of installments – often very fast in contemporary works – is increasingly under consideration. This essay turns to the novel series to analyze the effects of extended timebetween installments on thehandling of narrative time. In the case of Fielding’s third Bridget Jones novel and others like it, the suspended sequel creates a focus on the present, rather than directing the reader’s attention toward the possibilities for a future resolution. This focus on the present also counters the orientation toward the past characteristic of the kind of trauma narrative Fielding’s readers may have expected, proving the suspended serial especially hospitable not to a narrative of trauma but to a narrative of recovery. That Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a narrative of recovery is evident in manyways, including that readers are well into the novel before being able to piece together the story of the loss Bridget has suffered. Sometime after we lastmet her in The Edge of Reason, she and Mark were married and had a son and a daughter. Only months after the birth of their daughter, Mark was killed by an exploding landmine on amission to free twoBritish aidworkers being held hostage inDarfur.

中文翻译：

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暂停序列化和布里奇特·琼斯的复苏

当海伦·菲尔丁的第二本布里奇·琼斯小说出版十四年后，布里奇·琼斯：关于男孩的疯子（2013）出现时，甚至菲尔丁最忠实的读者也可能有不同的感受：激动地恢复一个心爱的角色，而她迷人的喜剧声音因害怕复苏而变得沮丧。不完整的是，这第三本小说将无法达到布里奇·琼斯的《日记》（1996）所创造的期望，就像有些人已经意识到的《布里奇·琼斯：理性的边缘》（1999）并不那样。当读者通过预先的媒体报道得知第三部小说的布里奇特是寡妇，而她的挚爱马克·达西已死时，恐慌恐怕要克服兴奋感：关于毁灭性的布里奇特·琼斯的小说很难想象。然而，读者对布里奇特可能无法通过自己经历的事情变得无法识别的担心很快就消除了：菲尔丁向她的听众保证，我们在一个仍然熟悉的虚构世界中遇到了一位熟悉的主角，而她的做到这一点尤其是通过部署我所谓的“悬浮”连续性。续集续集是一系列小说，在经历了相当大的实时性和故事时间之后才出现。这样的续集取决于我们对连续性的许多期望，尽管它会打乱其他人，尤其是在时间方面。由于序列研究主要集中于19世纪的期刊以及漫画，电视和数字叙事，因此分期安排的时间（在当代作品中通常非常快）正在得到越来越多的考虑。本文转向小说系列，分析分批之间延长的时间对叙事时间的影响。在菲尔丁的第三本布里奇特·琼斯小说和其他类似小说中，暂停的续集将重点放在当下，而不是将读者的注意力引向未来解决方案的可能性。对当前的关注也与创伤叙事的过去特征背道而驰。菲尔丁的读者可能已经预料到了这一点，这证明了这部悬而未决的剧集尤其好客，而不是创伤叙事，而是恢复叙事。布里奇特·琼斯（Bridget Jones）：《对男孩的疯狂》（Mad About the Boy）是一部关于叙事的叙事，这在许多方面都是显而易见的，包括读者在精通小说之前，能够将布里奇（Bridget）遭受的损失整理成故事。我们在《理性的边缘》中最后一次见到她后的某个时候，她和马克结婚了，并育有一子一女。马克的女儿出生仅几个月后，因释放一名两名在达尔富尔被劫为人质的英国救援人员而被爆炸中的地雷炸死。