Scorned Literature Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America

Subjects:

• Popular Culture » Popular Culture (General)
• Literature » American Literature
• Literature » Children's & Young Adult Literature

Reviews:

• ...a valuable addition to the literature on the genres addressed...Upper-division undergraduate and graduate students; general readers.
  —CHOICE September 2002
• This collection turns long-withheld serious attention to several scorned genres, including detective fiction, westerns, romance novels, war adventures, and horror stories.
  —American Literature March 2003

• Endorsement From Clark Evans
  Curatorare Books and Special Collections
  Library of Congress: Scorned Literature:Essays on the History and Criticism of Popular Mass-Produced Fiction in America provides fresh and provocative insights into American culture. A worthy and informative compilation of essays on the controversial response to popular fiction in the 19th century and 20th centuries, it is a valuable addition to any library with holdings in mass-produced culture.
• Endorsement From Dr. Sherrie A. Inness
  Department of English
  Miami University: Dime novels, romance novels, story papers, pulp magazines, juvenile series, and comics-what do these share in common? They are all forms of popular literature that have been scorned in our culture as inferior. Scorned Literature reveals that such popular literature often reveals as nuanced views of human culture as any other form of literature. This insightful and varied anthology opens up new vistas for exploring such work.
• Endorsement From Jayne Ann Krentz
  Author: The essays in this book illuminate the incredibly rich history of our favorite kinds of fiction. It is a history that is at grave risk of being lost to us forever because of elitist critics do not consider it sufficiently important to be preserved. But the greatest contribution these essays make is to lift the veil that those same critics have tried to throw over scorned lit. The contributors to the volume reveal what so many earnest and serious folks have gone to such great lengths to ignore or deny: The seething, roiling, power and incredible diversity of the creative forces at work in the stories and novels traditionally treated as scorned literature.
• Endorsement From Kay Mussell
  Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
  American University: By focusing on a wide variety of genres--dime novels, pulps, story papers, romances, detective stories, comics, books for children or adolescents, series books, and cheap reprints--over two centuries, this collection illuminates the common class-based, sexist, and political underpinnings of much of what passes for highminded cultural criticism of mass entertainment.
• Endorsement From J. Randolph Cox
  Editor, Dime Novel Round-up: This unique collection of critical essays examines several genres with more than a single critical approach. New criticism, feminist criticism, character studies, as well as historical and sociological methods are used to effect.

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