ENGL 89: "Trash: The Novel"

This Companion presents the current state of criticism in the field of American fiction from the earliest declarations of nationhood to secession and civil war. Draws heavily on historical and cultural contexts in its consideration of American fiction. Contains chapter on dime novels, as well as other relevant information.

A study of nineteenth century American popular fiction and working class culture.

Despite efforts of contemporary reformers to curb the availability of dime novels, series books, and paperbacks, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes reveals how many readers used them as means of resistance and how fictional characters became models for self-empowerment. These literary genres, whose value has long been underestimated, provide fascinating insight into the formation of American popular culture and identity. Through these mass-produced, widely read books, Deadwood Dick, Old Sleuth, and Jessie James became popular heroes that fed the public's imagination for the last western frontier, detective tales, and the myth of the outlaw. Women, particularly those who were poor and endured hard lives, used the literature as means of escape from the social, economic, and cultural suppression they experienced in the nineteenth century. In addition to the insight this book provides into texts such as The Bride of the Tomb, the Nick Carter Series, and Edward Stratemeyer's rendition of the Lizzie Borden case, readers will find interesting information about: the roles of illustrations and covers in consumer cultureBowling Green's endeavor to digitize paperback and pulp magazine coversbibliographical problems in collecting and controlling series booksthe effects of mass market fiction on young girlsLouisa May Alcott's pseudonym and authorship of three dime novelsspecial collectionscompetition among publishersA collection of work presented at a symposium held by the Library of Congress, Pioneers, Passionate Ladies, and Private Eyes makes an outstanding contribution to redefining the role of popular fiction in American life.

With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages.This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature.Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.

In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The OC hard-boiledOCO stories published in "Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly," and "Clues" featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic. In "Hard-Boiled" Erin A. Smith examines the culture that produced and supported this form of detective story through the 1940s. Relying on pulp magazine advertising, the memoirs of writers and publishers, Depression-era studies of adult reading habits, social and labor history, Smith offers an innovative account of how these popular stories were generated and read. She shows that although the work of pulp fiction authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner have become OC classicsOCO of popular culture, the hard-boiled genre was dominated by hack writers paid by the word, not self-styled artists. Pulp magazine editors and writers emphasized a gritty realism in the new genre. Unlike the highly rational and respectable British protagonists (Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, for instance), tough-talking American private eyes relied as much on their fists as their brains as they made their way through tangled plotlines. Casting working-class readers of pulp fiction as OC poachers, OCO Smith argues that they understood these stories as parables about Taylorism, work, and manhood; as guides to navigating consumer culture; as sites for managing anxieties about working women. Engaged in re-creating white, male privilege for the modern, heterosocial world, pulp detective fiction shaped readers into consumers by selling them what they wanted to hear OCo stories about manly artisan-heroes who resisted encroaching commodity culture and the female consumers who came with it. Commenting on the genreOCOs staying power, Smith considers contemporary detective fiction by women, minority, and gay and lesbian writers. "

"This new collection makes four previously hard-to-find dime Westerns easily available to readers who wish to enrich their understanding of nineteenth-century American literature. These varied novels provide a new and important context for examining classic, widely taught authors and tell us much about nineteenth-century attitudes toward race and gender." "With an introduction that critically examines the historical and cultural background of the dime Western, a chronology of relevant background information on historical figures and events, glosses of unfamiliar terms and references, numerous illustrations, and a selected bibliography, this edition makes frequently overlooked dime Westerns readily accessible for serious study."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This innovative cultural history investigates an intriguing, thrilling, and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in 1848--including dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans. Shelley Streeby uncovers themes and images in this "literature of sensation" that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture.