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Scorned Literature Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America
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Lydia Cushman Schurman, ed., Deidre Johnson
ISBN: 0-313-32033-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32033-0
264 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 1/30/2002
List Price: $99.95 (UK Sterling Price: £68.95)
Availability: Print on demand
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Description: Many works now considered classics were scorned by critics when they were first published. While some of these works received little attention when initially released, others were enormously popular. So too, there is a large body of popular American fiction that is only now beginning to receive critical attention. This book examines the growing respect given to American fiction that was scorned by cultural gatekeepers such as librarians and educators, though these works were widely read by the American public.

The volume looks at such scorned literature as dime novels, comic books, juvenile fiction, romances novels, and pulp magazines. Expert contributors discuss what these works say about the mores and morals of the people who so avidly read them and the values of those who sought to censor them. The book covers the period from the 1830s to the 1950s and shows how popular literature reflected such concerns as feminism and anti-feminism, notions of the heroic and unheroic, and violence and racism. In doing so, the volume helps fill a gap in scholarship about literature that was clearly important to a large number of readers.
Table of Contents:
  • Foreward by Madeline B. Stern
    Introduction by Deidre A. Johnson and Lydia Cushman Schurman
    Gresham's Law of Culture: The Case of Mickey Spillane and Postwar America by Jesse Berrett
    "Expressing" Herself: The Romance Novel and the Feminine Will to Power by Sarah S. G. Frantz
    Calamities of Convention in a Dime Novel Western by Janet Dean
    Marvel's Tomb of Dracula: Case Study in a Scorned Medium by Donald Palumbo
    "Blood in the Sky": The World War II Era Boys Series of R. Sidney Bowen by M. Paul Holsinger
    "It is a pity it is no better": The Story Paper and Its Critics in Nineteenth-Century America by Dawn Fisk Thommsen
    The Effect of Nineteenth-Century "Libraries" on the American Book Trade by Lydia Cushman Schurman
    "The ragtag and bobtail of the fiction parade": Pulp Magazines and the Literary Marketplace by Erin A. Smith
    From Abbott to Animorphs, from Godly Books to Goosebumps: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Modern Series by Deidre A. Johnson
    Poisoning Children's Culture: Comics and their Critics by Amy Kiste Nyberg
    "Wise Censorship": Cultural Authority and the Scorning of Juvenile Series Fiction, 1890-1940 by Kathleen Chamberlain
    Romance in the Stacks; or Popular Romance Fiction Imperiled by Alison M. Scott
    Index
About the Author: LYDIA CUSHMAN SCHURMAN is Professor Emerita of English at Northern Virginia Community College and has published widely on nineteenth-century popular fiction.

DEIDRE JOHNSON is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in children's literature. She has published extensively on Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer syndicate and is associate editor of Dime Novel Round-Up.
LCC Class: 813
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