Serialized fiction, a tradition that has been out of style for half a century, is enjoying a comeback. Three magazines – Slate, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s – have entered the game of running fiction in a series. The reasons vary from one publication to another, but the consensus among editors is that fiction these days is in need of some serious help.

The editor of Harper’s, Roger Hodge, announced last week that his magazine will publish “Happyland” a novel by J. Robert Lennon, which was orphaned when W.W. Norton pulled out of a deal to publish it. The first section will appear in the July issue of the magazine.

“Fiction is disappearing from magazines,” Mr. Hodge, said. “It’s a way for us to underline our commitment to fiction and really try to promote the form.”

Mr. Hodge said he’d had his eye out for something to serialize for a while before he heard about Mr. Lennon’s book. “I was just interested in doing something different with fiction,” Mr. Hodge said. “There’s a tendency for short stories to be taken for granted by readers.”

Harper’s bought the novel from Mr. Lennon in September, and, according to Mr. Hodge: “Almost as soon as we made the deal, I noticed that the New York Times started serializing that Elmore Leonard novel. So it seemed to be something in the air.”

It may have been something in the air, but the Times Magazine editor, Gerald Marzorati, certainly conceived of his serializing differently – not as a staunch defense of literary fiction, but as a way of drawing attention to more vital alternatives, like crime writing. Last fall the Times Magazine introduced the Funny Pages – a section of the magazine that includes an ongoing graphic novel, humorous true stories, and serialized works of genre fiction. The magazine began with a 14-installment novel by Mr. Leonard, followed by another crime novel by Patricia Cornwell; a legal thriller by Scott Turow is on its fifth installment.

“This is a particularly vibrant moment for genre fiction,” Mr. Marzorati said. “It’s not a particularly exciting moment, I think, for traditional short literary fiction.A lot of the best younger writers are in the mood to tackle the novel.”

The strength of different literary genres tends to run in cycles, Mr. Marzorati said: “When I got to New York in the mid-’70s, there was a lot of discussion about short, literary fiction, whether it was Raymond Carver or Ann Beattie, or Alice Munro or William Trevor. I don’t think that’s the case now.”

Mr. Marzorati said that publishing genre fiction also seemed appropriate to a magazine “that comes in a newspaper, that’s not a literary journal.” Still, the Gray Lady was perhaps not the most obvious home for the colorful dialogue of Mr. Leonard.

“I don’t know why they picked me,” Mr. Leonard said, “because the way my characters tend to talk – well,it’s not for family newspapers.”

Landing a serial deal has long been a goal of Mr. Leonard’s. “Fifty years ago, my ambition was to get with a serial into the Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. They were running Western serials, five, six, seven parts, and that was the way to really make some money,” he said.”I got in the Saturday Evening Post once in 1957, with a short story but not a serial. They said that my work was too relentless – it didn’t have any blue sky in it.”

He plans to continue the plot begun in his serial, “Comfort to the Enemy,” in his next full-length novel.

Mr. Turow was also positive, both about the experience and about the Times Magazine’s new interest in fiction. “When I was in college, fiction ran regularly in Esquire and the Atlantic and the Saturday Evening Post. That magazine market has gone the way of the dodo bird. I don’t know how [the idea of fiction serials] will catch on, but it’s a wonderful thing for somebody to give it a go.”

In contrast to both Mr. Hodge and Mr. Marzorati, Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, wanted to do something that did not resemble conventional magazine fiction, whether of the literary or the pulp variety.

“We emphatically didn’t want to do something that would be seen as just regular serializing,” Mr. Weisberg said, adding that he didn’t have to completely conceptualize the change. When he introduced the idea of writing an Internet novel to Walter Kirn, the writer knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Mr. Kirn’s notion was to write the novel “in real time” – meaning just on deadline, to be published in twice-weekly posts. “I thought it would be most interesting to truly do this in real time, move it along week by week, sort of a radio program, or a kind of living performance,” Mr. Kirn said.

His posts are edited in detail by the culture editor, Meghan O’Rourke, but they go up on Slate’s Web site only a day or two after he writes them. (The Times Magazine and Harper’s aren’t performing quite this same experiment. Mr. Lennon’s “Happyland” is already finished, and Mr. Marzorati said that the Times Magazine needs to have at least four or five installments lined up in advance, in order to create the art, and “in case the writer gets sick or something.”)

For Mr. Kirn, who has just finished the 24th installment of “The Unbinding” (the novel will conclude in June), writing an Internet novel has been a different process – and in some ways, a more gratifying one – than writing a conventionally published novel.

“It’s very exciting,” he said, “to the point of being over-stimulating. It challenges you to take advantage of inspiration, sudden notions, and momentum, and put aside the kind of staid, overly cautious approach that one uses when writing for a publication that’s going to be a year away.”

Among other things, writing a serialized novel – and a serialized Web novel in particular – allows him to make social commentary without having to worry that his references will be dated by the time of publication. “The Unbinding” has incorporated events as trivial as the opening of “Mission Impossible III,” and as serious as the controversy over the Bush administration’s sweeps of phone logs.

In Mr. Kirn’s opinion, the conventional publishing cycle is partly to blame for draining fiction’s vitality. “You get this sort of embalmed storytelling; it’s like iceberg lettuce. It’s meant to travel and not rot.” In Web writing, by contrast, “You can bring the catch up to the dock.”

Mr. Weisberg compared what Mr. Kirn is doing – by writing his novel in public and incorporating the outside culture – to what Tom Wolfe did when he wrote an early version of “Bonfire of the Vanities” as a serial for Rolling Stone in 1984 and 1985. Mr. Wolfe complained at the time that current events kept imitating, or overtaking, his plot.

Perhaps the current trend of serialization may foretell a renaissance, possibly of a different, more effervescent kind of writing. Mr. Kirn, at least, thinks that writers will begin to recognize the opportunity that the serialized novel on the Internet represents.

“Internet writing is closest to the spirit of that very lively, tumultuous age of serialization,” he said. “It’s been a dream for a long time of writers and storytellers – that they could somehow approach their audience directly. And this makes it possible.”