Dime Novels Research Articles

Human Document: Charmian London's Role in the Composition of The Road

Human DocumentCharmian London's Role in the Composition of The Road Iris Jamahl Dunkle (bio) In 1907, Jack London published The Road, his first-hand account of life on the road as a tramp.1 The essays first appeared serially in Cosmopolitan Magazine and then were collected and released as a book by Macmillan later that same year. But this upbeat collection of interconnected essays wasn't the first time London had written about the subject. In fact, the book was a significant revision of his earlier, less successful essay also titled "The Road" which he'd written in 1896 when he was only twenty years old. Between his early essay and the final book of connected essays, huge shifts occurred in his point of view. London's early essay was one of observation, wherein he viewed the tramp as an outsider, people who existed on "the ragged edge of nonentity" ("The Road" 65). His scholarly tone is enhanced by allusions to Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and his adoption of the pronoun "we" as if he were a member of his middle-class audience instead of someone who had actually lived as a tramp himself. Indeed, he "only hints at his own personal experience" (Raskin 64). When London describes the different classes of tramps like the "Stew Bum" and "The Profesh" he renders them as two-dimensional, omitting the "character studies" he'd noted in his journal of the men he'd observed during his travels (Raskin 64). He even goes so far as to compare the life and ways of the tramp to those of an exotic unknown, "the inhabitants of the Cannibal Islands" ("The Road" 66). This approach was one his audience would have been quite familiar with. During the late 1890s, the image of the tramp occurred frequently in newspaper stories, magazine articles, satirical cartoons, dime novels, and vaudeville melodramas (Durica 471). According to Frederick Feied, London's early "superficial" depiction of the tramp was in line with other fictional treatments of the late 1890s "which made little or no attempt [End Page 19] to develop either the character or the philosophy of the hobo or to understand his position" (15). Most depictions were written by authors who had little knowledge about this subject. Ironically, London did have first-hand experience but chose not to incorporate all of it into his account. London's symbolic, two-dimensional tramp would again appear in several lesser-known short stories and his essays, "How I Became a Socialist" (March 1903), "The Tramp," (February through April of 1904), and "What Life Means to Me" (March 1906). However, one begins to see a transition in his point of view about how he represents the tramp in his short story "The Apostate," which he completed writing on March 29, 1906. The story was published as part of a special issue of Cosmopolitan devoted to the negative impact of child labor. In London's story, the protagonist, Johnny, leaves his grueling life as a jute mill worker after he becomes ill to catch a train and become a tramp. In the final moments of the story one sees Johnny leave behind his nearly religious devotion to work and the family that depends on him for the freedom and risk offered by the life of the tramp: "[h]e passed out of the house and down the street. A wan delight came into his face at the sight of the lone tree. 'Jes' ain't gonna do nothin',' he said to himself, half aloud in a crooning tone. He glanced wistfully up at the sky, but the bright sun blinded and dazzled him" (134). Johnny feels delight when he sees a natural object like the lone tree because he has spent his life as more machine than boy. He is thrilled to experience the natural world and to finally have freedom to anticipate but he is blinded by the sun because he has never really lived under it. Johnny is a complex character who has embraced the tramp's philosophy to "dream and wander" and whose epiphany invites the reader to understand that sometimes there can always be a sad...

Prejudice for Profit: Escaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture

Prejudice for ProfitEscaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture Kara M. French (bio) During the sweltering summer of 1834, a gang of working-class men—brickmakers, sailors, apprentices, and firemen—surrounded the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The crowd, acting on rumor that Sister Mary St. John Harrison "has been secreted or abducted" to Canada against her will, threatened to burn the convent to the ground unless she was released. When Harrison did not come forward, they set fire to the convent and school with "twelve nuns, and fifty-seven female scholars" inside. Newspapers from Maine to Maryland reported how the rioters stole the Mount Benedict ciborium, smashed the sisters' expensive musical instruments, and converted the personal library of Boston's Bishop Fenwick into fuel for a bonfire. As a final act of desecration, the mob "burst open the tomb, and ransacked the coffins" of dead nuns, searching for the bodies of Sister Harrison and the Ursulines' young Protestant pupils, rumored to have been murdered behind the convent walls.1 Tales of illicit sex and abused women rose from the ashes of the Charlestown riot. Just as the Charlestown rioters were being brought to [End Page 503] trial in 1835, ex-novice Rebecca Reed's autobiography, Six Months in a Convent, detailed a life of horrors. According to Reed, the sisters of Mount Benedict heaped slavish devotion on their Mother Superior and were subjected to bizarre and cruel penances. The convent was a place of unmentionable sexual deviance, where confession with the Bishop led to "various improper questions" regarding the novices' sexual habits and where Superior Mary St. George Moffat was inclined to "bestow presents and caress" the sisters who were her "great favorites."2 The burning of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts was and is a well-known tale, in its own time and in ours. For scholars of the early republic, the burning of the convent represents an object lesson in anti-Catholic prejudice, a perfect storm of religious intolerance, gender trouble, and class conflict. For citizens of the early republic, the event served to confirm their worst fears—either about the nefarious lives of nuns and priests or about the limits of religious toleration. For early republican publishers, it created an opportunity. With the riot at the Ursuline convent in 1834, the relationship between print and protest worked in reverse of what one might expect. Rather than the publication of an explosive text provoking an outbreak of violence, the burning of the convent was an occasion of violence that provoked an outbreak of print. The two anti-Catholic "escaped nun" narratives that became bestsellers in antebellum era, Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent and Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu, would not be published until more than a year after the convent lay in ashes. While the political, social, and gendered implications of the Charles-town riot have been explored, the way the burning of the convent was exploited by publishers for financial gain deserves closer examination. Though Reed's and Monk's narratives have the distinction of being the best-selling and most well-known "escaped nun" tales, the burning of the convent encouraged the flourishing of an anti-Catholic print genre that promised to expose the secret lives of nuns and priests. A feeding frenzy of anti-Catholic literature ensued at every level of the literary marketplace, from cheaply printed dime novels to ornate gift books. These "escaped nun" stories capitalized on the horror the perceived gender and sexual deviance of nuns provoked in the Protestant imagination. Antebellum publishers spent thousands manufacturing lithograph illustrations of novices cutting their hair to take the veil and mass-printed [End Page 504] stories that featured cross-dressing "female Jesuits" and Machiavellian lady superiors.3 Commercial print and the whims of the publishing marketplace not only drove a boom in anti-Catholic publishing but also sparked American Catholics to mount a vigorous defense in print. Given the ubiquity of print in the early republic, it is perhaps not surprising that a religious minority would develop their own print sphere. As the recent outpouring of scholarship on African American print culture has...

Richard Wright: The Man Who Lived Underground

Always interested in new ideas and conscious of his responsibilities as a black intellectual, Richard Wright must nevertheless be considered, when one delves into his fiction, primarily as a storyteller for whom a good narrative is valid for what it relates as much as for what it signifies. One constantly finds traces in him of the poor black child who owes his spiritual survival in racist Mississippi and, in part, his vocation as a writer to detective stories, popular fiction and dime novels. Indeed, he was always drawn towards stories in which truth is stranger than fiction; and after bringing unlikely events into his novels, he took a sly pleasure in disclosing the authenticity of episodes which his bewildered readers had taken for wild fabrications. We can easily imagine his delight when he came across, in the August 1941 issue of True Detective, The Crime Hollywood Couldn't Believe, written by Hal Fletcher from the account given by Lt. C. W. Gains of the Los Angeles Police. One night in November 1931, the sub-manager of the local branch of the Owl Drug Company had deposited eleven thousand dollars in the safe of his store; and, on opening the intact safe the follow? ing morning, the director had not found a trace of the money in it. As the two men were above all suspicion, and there was no sign of burglary, the mystery remained unsolved. Two weeks later, the safe of a clothing store ?to which only the owner possessed the key?was emptied in the same way. Then there was an epidemic of thefts; linen, jewelry, typewriters, food, blankets, books, etc., disappeared by magic always in the same neighborhood. In the spring of the following year, the field of these mysterious thefts was transferred a few streets. Incredibly enough, the manager of the Baker Shoe Company, who had left two thousand dollars and twenty-six cents in his safe one fine night, found the two thousand

The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith

Reviewed by: The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith Ashley Reed SMITH, SANDRA WILSON. The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. 280 pp. $55.00 hardcover; $55.00 e-book. It is perhaps fitting that Sandra Wilson Smith’s The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 should have appeared in the same year that saw the death of the groundbreaking literary historian Nina Baym. The Action-Adventure Heroine is clearly inspired by Baym’s crucial works of literary recovery, including Woman’s Fiction (1978) and Women Writers of the American West (2011). Like Baym, Smith seeks to reshape our understanding of American literary history, and particularly of the role of women in that history, by unearthing a forgotten female archetype. Smith’s work traces a character she calls “the action-adventure heroine” from the captivity narratives of Puritan New England to the detective stories of Gilded Age dime novels. “This bold heroine,” Smith asserts, “tramps alone through the forests, demonstrates tremendous physical strength, braves dangers without hesitation, enters the public realm to earn money, and even kills her enemy when necessary” (1). While other critics have discussed gender-bending female archetypes such as the tomboy and the masculine girl, the figure Smith examines is characterized by her participation in an “extended, physically rigorous journey” (5) and, in many cases, by her willingness to use physical violence in defense of herself or others. To recover this forgotten figure, Smith arranges her text chronologically, with the first three chapters exploring the role of the frontier heroine in the colonial and early national eras. Chapter 1 unearths the action-adventure heroine as she appears in Indian captivity narratives, whether factual (the Puritan goodwife Hannah Dustan), fictional (the unnamed protagonist of the Panther captivity), or somewhere in between (the “fierce woman of Crab Orchard” [43] in early histories of Daniel Boone). In addition to tending her home, the woman in each of these narratives is also called upon to violently defend it, usually from marauding (and ambiguously motivated) Indians. Just as the dangers of the frontier extenuated female violence in the captivity narrative, America’s wars of national independence provided a fictional warrant for female adventure. In her second chapter, Smith locates the action-adventure heroine in tales of female soldiers and sailors, including Mercy Otis Warren’s The Ladies of Castile (1790), Herman [End Page 324] Mann’s The Female Review (1797), and the anonymously authored The Female Marine (1815). In these texts, the female heroine who fights in the Revolution or the War of 1812 “suggests metaphorically that Americans—men and women together—were building a powerful, model nation” (55). Smith’s third chapter addresses one of the most popular literary forms of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries: the seduction novel. In discussions of The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1789–90) and The Female Wanderer (1824), Smith highlights how wandering heroines of the early national period repudiated the figure of the cast-off victim of seduction by leaving home to pursue their true (and unfailingly faithful) loves. “In these anti-seduction tales,” Smith asserts, “women have the strength, intellect, and moral fiber to protect and promote bourgeois values, which contribute to the development of a strong nation” (87). The next three chapters of The Action-Adventure Heroine address antebellum texts, where the presence of this archetypal figure, Smith suggests, has been obscured by a longstanding critical focus on sentimental domesticity. Smith devotes her fourth chapter to the early novels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, A New-England Tale (1822), Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), and The Linwoods (1835). While Sedgwick’s action-adventure heroines (including A New-England Tale’s Jane Elton, Redwood’s Deborah Lenox and Ellen Bruce, Hope Leslie’s Magawisca and eponymous heroine, and The Linwoods’s Isabella Linwood, Rose, and Mrs. Bengin) are rarely physically violent, they do participate in extended journeys that take them “beyond the boundaries of the home [to] perform active feats of heroism in public spaces” (102). Chapter 5 turns to western frontier novels of the 1840s and 1850s which...

Pozdrowienia z Krakowa. "Belle Epoque" kontra "Tabu"

Two series premiered in 2017: British-American Taboo and Polish Belle Epoque. The year is not the only similarity – based on the statements by Edward Miszczak, head of programming of the TVN channel, resemblance was sought and even intended. Similitude in the main character’s image as well as the starting point of the story lines proved to be misleading. A closer look at both shows reveals that the only feature that they have in common is their rootedness in popular (and vernacular) cultural traditions: in Taboo intentional and visible references to political fiction, film noir aesthetics, graphic novel and heist movie; in Belle Epoque (topical but also stylistic) resemblance to popular gutter circulation novels (dime novels) on Polish territory at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries.

Límites a la libertad de expresión en Estados Unidos. La lucha contra las "publicaciones inmorales" (siglos XIX y XX)

Immoral publications were forbidden practically from the formation of the United States. This was mainly due to the activity of the Vice Societies, which were highly influential between the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Some of the most persecuted readings were the dime novels (XIXth century), pulp magazines (1900-1940) and comic books (1940-1956). Critics accused these magazines of being violent and obscene and called for for Acts forbidding their sale. The first Acts related to Post Office regulations, as these magazines used the postal system for their distribution. Later, some states and cities passed Criminal Codes and special laws and orders which included penalties for selling immoral readings. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declared many of these rules to be unconstitutional as they violated the First and Fifth Amendments.Fecha de envio / Submission date: 23/03/2018Fecha de aceptacion / Acceptance date: 25/04/2018

Criollismo, experiencia popular y política: el gaucho como emblema subversivo

El presente trabajo pone en discusión la interpretación del fenómeno del “criollismo popular” en Argentina como una expresión pasajera y propia de las tensiones y desacoples de un procesos de “modernización”. Por el contrario, a partir del análisis de la literatura barata de circulación entre las clases populares, de las canciones de los payadores criollos y del teatro de temática gauchesca, se sostiene aquí que debe considerárselo un fenómeno más perdurable, cuya función fue más bien la de canalizar críticas sociales –a las élites dirigentes, de clase y étnico-raciales– y la de colaborar con el proceso de “etnogénesis”, es decir, de la conflictiva definición de un sentido de distintividad grupal a partir de la heterogénea población que ocupaba el territorio argentino hacia finales del siglo XIX.

Framing the Boy Problem in the Early Twentieth Century: The Willie Doherty Murder of 1902

In 1902 three teenagers visited a public park in Saint John, New Brunswick. Three days later one of them was found shot to death. This case study of the murder of Willie Doherty and the trials of Frank Higgins and Fred Goodspeed examines how a critical event crystalized the justice system, social reform, and press understandings of the boy problem in one community at the turn of the twentieth century. The case suggested, in the case of working-class youth, the existence of a semi-autonomous “boys world” that operated beyond the reach of adults, including the police. Reformers were as likely to blame environmental influences such as poor parenting, popular culture such as dime novels, or socio-economic deprivation, as they were the anti-social personality traits of delinquents. The study also explores the degree of freedom enjoyed by children and youth in the turn-of-the-century industrial city.

Framing the Boy Problem in the Early Twentieth Century: The Willie Doherty Murder of 1902

In 1902 three teenagers visited a public park in Saint John, New Brunswick. Three days later one of them was found shot to death. This case study of the murder of Willie Doherty and the trials of Frank Higgins and Fred Goodspeed examines how a critical event crystalized the justice system, social reform, and press understandings of the boy problem in one community at the turn of the twentieth century. The case suggested, in the case of working-class youth, the existence of a semi-autonomous “boys world” that operated beyond the reach of adults, including the police. Reformers were as likely to blame environmental influences such as poor parenting, popular culture such as dime novels, or socio-economic deprivation, as they were the anti-social personality traits of delinquents. The study also explores the degree of freedom enjoyed by children and youth in the turn-of-the-century industrial city.

Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism by Loretta M. Gaffney

Reviewed by: Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism by Loretta M. Gaffney Nadia Clifton (bio) Young Adult Literature, Libraries, and Conservative Activism. By Loretta M. Gaffney. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. In this book, Loretta M. Gaffney explores young adult literature as a cultural and political phenomenon. By considering critiques and defenses of this literature and detailing the history and importance of librarians in shaping its canon, Gaffney jumps into a lively and strongly opinionated discussion on the relevance, importance, and role of young adult literature in the lives of teenagers. Each chapter includes historical background to bring the reader into the long conversation about adolescent literature, providing context for its ongoing discussion. By exploring the politics and power relationships in the act of reading, Gaffney puts forward a vision of these texts’ extensive impact. As she writes, “YA Literature is not simply a collection of books: it is an idea about the value of youthful perspectives, the importance of forging identities and communities, and the power and possibility of public reading” (54). [End Page 118] In the introductory chapter, Gaffney lays the groundwork for productive ways of reading young adult novels. First, she defines adolescent literature in a way that goes beyond the age of protagonist or reader. She encourages a focus on literature that is more political, literature with young protagonists that explores and critiques society as well as books focused on the teenage perspective of what she calls “the eternal present,” a description of the teenager’s ability to “live in the heat of the moment” (6; orig. emphasis). She continues by outlining the history of the form, its foundational novels, and its slow yet steady rise in academia. Finally, she introduces the three main concepts that she proposes should be used for reading adolescent literature and its criticism: aesthetics, pedagogy, and pleasure. Each of these reading strategies is given its own space for further exploration in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapter 2 addresses the intended audience of adolescent literature: teenagers. The reigning narrative is that teens are “reluctant” readers. Concern about youth reading, especially recreational reading, is not new, dating back at least to the dime novels of the nineteenth century. The perpetuation of this narrative, however, leads to an image of teenage readers that Gaffney argues is limiting. Since teens engage in a combination of print and digital literacies, she advocates that a new definition of reading be constructed and applied when observing teen reading practices today. This combination of print and digital literacies creates a situation where rather than simply being passive consumers of information, adolescent readers are also active creators, especially online. Traditional stereotypes and theories influence how we construct these readers, and we often forget to take them at face value. A qualitative analysis is more productive than a quantitative one, especially the realization that they read for pleasure rather than information. We must also remember to take into account the actual reading practices of teenagers, not those that we impose upon them. Chapter 3 discusses aesthetics, the first of Gaffney’s three strategies for reading young adult literature. A historical context reveals that librarians were the first group to insist on books for young people that were not just pedagogically useful, but aesthetically pleasing as well. In this way, librarians play an integral part in creating and growing the adolescent literary canon. This gatekeeper role, however, is criticized by those who argue about the merits of realistic versus fantasy literature within the canon. Today, Gaffney calls for an interrogation of the basis of defense for books: “If we elect to use literary quality or the canon as an answer to critics, the criteria for determining such quality must not go unexamined” (50). She also claims a role for librarians as the defenders of teens’ freedom to read. Although librarians must choose books that embody both literary quality and appeal, they also tend to recognize the importance of reader choice because the reader is the one who makes meaning from the text. Chapter 4 examines Gaffney’s second strategy, pedagogy, by addressing bibliotherapy and the problem novel. [End Page 119] Young adult literature tends to be viewed as books that...

Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War ed. by Colleen Glenney Boggs

Reviewed by: Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War ed. by Colleen Glenney Boggs Richmond B. Adams Teaching the Literatures of the American Civil War. Edited by Colleen Glenney Boggs. ( New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2016. Pp. xii, 317. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-1-60329-276-4; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 978-1-60329-275-7.) Exploring the literature of the American Civil War remains as daunting as it is overwhelming. To prepare a volume that expands on various ways to teach students about the relationship between the war and the fictions that grew from it becomes more intimidating still. Faced with this task, Colleen Glenney Boggs has compiled a useful and insightful volume of essays in an effort to mitigate what she describes as the period's absence "from our scholarly and pedagogical approaches to American literary studies" (p. 1). Boggs helpfully divides the essays into four sections that address unique approaches to teaching aspects of the war, including works that discuss literature in the historical context of antebellum period and in the war's aftermath, approaches to various literary genres, and a last segment entitled "Teaching Materials." Larry J. Reynolds's essay covers how the antebellum works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson helped shape understandings of the origins of the war. Alison E. Carey's essay examines the seemingly noncanonical but culturally significant dime novels that common soldiers carried into camp and combat. Wiebke Omnus Klumpenhower, drawing on her experience teaching students in South Korea, helpfully provides a way for American readers to grapple with issues they may face while teaching international students. The essay by Darren T. Williamson, Shawn Jones, and William Steele reflects their interdisciplinary team-teaching approach, which involves taking students to actual battlefields as part of a course. It contains superb ideas for broadening student engagement with the war's complexities while potentially saving them the costs of covering the same breadth of material. Catherine E. Saunders's essay examines the poetry of African American soldiers and helps shape the necessary Part 3, "Teaching Specific Topics." Contributions from Jessica DeSpain, Elizabeth Duquette, Matthew R. Davis, Michael Ziser, and Ian Finseth provide an almost literal center to the collection with their corporate and singular examinations of previously unheard voices. Saunders's essay in particular is well balanced by Faith Barrett's earlier examination of not simply "Reading the Civil War in Poetry," as Barrett puts it in [End Page 466] her essay's subtitle, but to do so in conjunction with song. Finseth's contention that the "Civil War did not so much produce literary realism as provide a set of conditions in which a variety of writers (and visual artists) grappled with the meanings of large-scale bloodletting" provides solid grounding for extended discussions of a once-held maxim in American literary history (p. 124). Boggs's collection has easily earned a place within pedagogical and scholarly realms. On a small note, if for no other reason than the ever-increasing number of volumes aimed at assisting teaching efforts, adding an essay or two on strictly literary concerns and perhaps including one fewer on how teaching a topic remains beyond even the best pedagogy might have enhanced the collection. Past that minor matter, Boggs has produced a superb collection that should become part of any university or personal library. Its relatively modest price makes such an acquisition possible. Richmond B. Adams Northwestern Oklahoma State University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque by Libby Murphy

charme propre” (266). Que diraient ces voyageurs s’ils revenaient aujourd’hui et voyaient les gratte-ciel qui ont remplacé les tentes et les puits de pétrole qui occupent le chimérique désert? Auburn University (AL) Samia I. Spencer Murphy, Libby. The Art of Survival: France and the Great War Picaresque. New Haven: Yale UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-300-21751-3. Pp. 279. Were the countless French infantrymen who after summer 1914 marched off to war along flag-lined thoroughfares so many consenting victims resigned to the patriotic necessity of bloodshed? Seconding historian Leonard Smith who questions the Great War metanarrative as a tragedy of victimization, Libby Murphy restores to consciousness a neglected constant of wartime experience: even as they obeyed orders, ordinary soldiers were overwhelmingly concerned with saving their hide. Rather than epic or elegy, it was the picaresque mode—concretized by the haphazard wanderings of LouisFerdinand Céline’s Bardamu, a morally pliant being if ever there was one—that best exemplified the improvisational, come-what-may attitude of the French foot soldier portrayed in the literary cultures of the day. Unrivaled in his mastery of le système D and always seeking a lucky break, the Gallic picaro-in-arms comes across in Murphy’s generous account as an irreverent trickster whose independence of thought and, on occasion, of action places him at odds with his imagined German counterparts, strictly beholden to military authority, or to the phlegmatic Britons who sheepishly “muddle through” the war. But it is those armchair patriots à la Maurice Barrès who attracted the most biting criticism: as tenacious as a trench rat himself, le poilu saw through hypocrisy and refused to accept shirkers’ incessant propagandizing, or bourrage de crâne. Building on an impressive command of Great War historiography from Jean Norton Cru’s Témoins (1929) to Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Murphy roundly takes issue with literary critic Evelyn Cobley (and presumably Pierre Schoentjes, author of Fictions de la Grande Guerre [2009]) who solemnly cast the foot soldier as brutalized victim. Laughter—given full literary expression through satire— was inseparable from the titular French “art of survival.” Eight chapters place in dialogue literary and journalistic texts from Le Crapouillot to Le Canard enchaîné, dime novels, illustrated caricatures, and film (released in France in 1919 as Charlot soldat, Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms is a lesson in picaresque resourcefulness). This eclecticism has the merit of desacralizing the Great War literary corpus: satirist Georges de La Fouchardière’s serialized Le bouif and Léon Werth’s messily episodic Clavel soldat receive more generous airings than do Henri Barbusse’s canonical Le feu or Céline’s début novel. Murphy draws apposite comparisons with British, German, and Czech sources; thus Bruce Bairnsfather’s Old Bill drawings stand alongside Francisque Poulbot’s depictions of Montmartre street children giddily playing war. At stake is 208 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 Reviews 209 how in the face of senseless violence the picaresque pragmatics of “getting by” pervaded the Great War literary and pictorial imaginary, and how texts refashioned an erstwhile Spanish narrative mode known for its blend of epic “adventure time” and routine “everyday time” (19) and for its peripatetic working-class or peasant protagonist, who encounters an array of human types while remaining a non-entity or“everyman”(24). Accessible and witty, this exploration of French cultural memory does much to refocus our understanding of la guerre de 14–18 by retrieving the nimble-spirited ingenuity that sustained French society until 1930, when pessimistic narratives of heroic victimization displaced it. Johns Hopkins University (MD) Derek Schilling Pfaff, Françoise. Nouveaux entretiens avec Maryse Condé: écrivain et témoin de son temps. Paris: Karthala, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8111-1707-8. Pp. 200. Françoise Pfaff’s 1993 Entretiens avec Maryse Condé introduced the author to the public at a crucial time in her career and presented an exploration of the relationship between Condé’s life and her work as writer, academic and activist. Nouveaux entretiens updates readers on Condé’s trajectory since then, as she reflects on events that have transformed the world she engages in her work and...

‘Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

In recent years, censorship in nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe has increasingly attracted scholarly interest. Historians like Gary D. Stark or Robert J. Goldstein highlighted the crucial role censorship played in modern society. Drawing on such recent work in European culture, Kara L. Ritzheimer proposes a new approach to the history of censorship in early twentieth-century Germany. Having already explored censorship agencies in a regional case study of Baden, Ritzheimer’s new book revises and broadens her dissertation project to a national study of censorship. By focusing on the so-called anti-‘trash’ activists’ rhetoric from the early 1900s to the 1930s, the study aims at explaining ‘how and why lawmakers [in Weimar Germany, C.T.] voted in favor of censorship’ and ‘how these laws became possible over the course of two regimes and one war’ (p. 2). As the study makes clear, censorship turned out to be a form of youth protection as mass culture ‘trash’, that is serialized books, dime novels, pamphlet fiction and film dramas, was accused of ruining the youth intellectually, morally and physically.

The "Forgotten Era": Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier

The "Forgotten Era"Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier Rebecca S. Wingo In the summer of 1860 the House of Beadle and Adams (HBA) launched their first dime novel, starting a genre filled with sensational, typically Western adventure stories woven with a delicate layer of romance and lessons about Victorian morality and racial stereotypes. The first among many rival dime novel publishers, HBA's inaugural novel, Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter (June 9, 1860) by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens, chronicles the relationship between Malaeska and her mixed-blood son. Two days before Malaeska's release, the publishing house ran an advertisement in the New York Tribune: "BOOKS FOR THE MILLION! A dollar book for a dime."1 Before they shut down their printing presses in 1898, HBA alone published 3,158 separate dimes.2 Despite their significant contribution to the genre of Western literature, dime novels were replaced as quickly as they started by the cloth-bound book, leading some scholars to term the dime novel era from 1860 to 1900 the "forgotten era."3 Stephens contributed six more dime novels between 1860 and 1864, ending with The Indian Queen, the third novel in a trilogy about a mixed-race woman who returns to the Seneca Nation to assume leadership after the chief (her father) dies. On the surface, Stephens's first and last novels are extraordinarily similar: they are about Native American tribes in the Northeast during the colonial period, center on women, and discuss interracial sex. Since HBA published them in 1860 and 1864 respectively, one might even link them to Civil War era racial ideologies. However, this connection elides a more probing read of the racial subtext. Malaeska actually originated in 1836, not 1860, as a short story called "The Jockey Cap," published in Stephens's first magazine, Portland Magazine. Comparing Malaeska to The Indian Queen highlights the cultural and social shifts that occurred in mid-nineteenth-century America. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, racial theories began shifting away from the [End Page 121] belief that Native Americans could assimilate into "civilized" white society, favoring instead the idea that no amount of social uplift could separate Native Americans from their "savage" blood.4 While Malaeska reflects more of the 1830s mentalité, The Indian Queen reflects the growing emphasis on scientific racism. These two dime novels tell a national story as they reveal dominant American attitudes toward Indigenous peoples. They also illuminate the cultural importance of female authors who used the power of suggestion in their narratives, both to challenge and to confirm the confines of Victorian gender roles, using Native Americans as proxy stand-ins for white women's liberation. ann stephens and the history of the dime novel Before we can understand the narratives, we must first understand the author and the period in which she wrote. It is no coincidence that HBA chose Stephens's work as their first dime novel. Her prolific writing career with a wide audience made her the ideal choice to boost their immediate popularity and success. Stephens grew up in a solid middle-class family. Her father, John Winterbotham, worked a steady job at Humphreysville Manufactoring Company in Connecticut, which ensured that Stephens would receive an excellent education. She read voraciously at the public library in what her biographer Paola Gemme calls a "self-imposed literary apprenticeship." She married Edward Stephens, a local merchant, in 1831. The couple moved to Maine in 1834 and started their own regional magazine called Portland Magazine. Edward served as publisher, Ann as editor and main contributor.5 Stephens's initial foray into editing, literature, and writing launched her career. The couple moved to New York City in 1837, where she became the associate editor of publisher William Snowden's Ladies Companion, a monthly magazine. In addition to contributing literature to the magazine, Stephens increased circulation from 3,000 to 17,000 readers per month. Her work for Ladies Companion further propelled her success: she went on to hold an associate editor position at Graham's Magazine alongside Edgar Allan Poe in 1841; co-edited Lady's World of Fashion, which later became Peterson's Magazine (1842–53...

The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert

Reviewed by: The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert Brent M. S. Campney The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. By Matthew Christopher Hulbert. UnCivil Wars. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. x, 327. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5002-8; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5001-1.) "My purpose," writes historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert in The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West, "is to analyze the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered narratives of guerrilla warfare in rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and film, at reunions, and on the stage" (p. 4). Focusing on the American Civil War on the Kansas-Missouri border, Hulbert argues that the long-standing historiographical emphasis on the eastern theater has obscured the irregular violence in the West. "The segregation of homefront violence—that is, of various types of guerrilla warfare—from traditional concepts of battlefield violence … has served a broader moral purpose that is unmasked through a study of guerrilla memory," he argues (p. 5). "On one hand, this distinction has effectively 'othered' irregular violence as uniquely uncivilized and awful; on the other, it has preserved the glories of the regular war by robbing it of its own true awfulness in memory" (p. 5). The author positions his work as a western extension and critique of David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) and Caroline E. Janney's Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, 2014). Whereas Blight and Janney explored sectional reunion and reconciliation in the eastern states, Hulbert looks at how combatants and contemporary observers, as well as later scholars and artists, struggled to tell their own stories of the war against the constraints of a master narrative developed by those who believed their interpretation of "the regular war" defined the Civil War (p. 12). He also examines how some of the most notorious pro-Confederate guerrillas—Jesse James in [End Page 995] particular—came to be remembered as western gunfighters and bank robbers rather than as Civil War fighters. Hulbert argues that the fictitious contemporary dime novels published after the war "systematically transformed Jesse James; they downplayed the formative Civil War elements of his biography; they placed him, with increasing frequency, in murderous showdowns along the frontiers of Mexico and Texas; and they simultaneously made him over as a sixgun-slinging desperado of the southwestern frontier and as the proprietor of a vast Texas ranching operation" (p. 199). The book is capacious in its breadth and depth, examining, among other subjects, the brutality of the guerrilla war in Missouri and—to a significantly lesser extent—in Kansas. The author also explores the active but often ignored roles of women, the efforts of pro-Confederates and Unionists to control "guerrilla memory" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the commemorative reunions of those who fought on one side or the other, and the interpretations offered by more recent films on the border war, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Ride with the Devil (1999), and True Grit (1969) (p. 4). Hulbert is a strong and engaging writer capable of capturing and maintaining the attention of his readers. Nevertheless, he has a tendency in places toward overstatement. For example, while any reader would agree that the slaughter of some two hundred civilians and Union soldiers in Lawrence, Kansas, and the burning of the town were atrocities, many readers would surely object to Hulbert comparing the incident to genocide. By the early twentieth century, he writes, "Many of the 'old time' residents of Lawrence, Kansas, wore their survival of the 1863 massacre like a badge of honor—not unlike survivors of the Third Reich's 'final solution' several decades later" (p. 109). Still, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory is an important book that should be of interest to scholars of the Civil War, the American West, and memory and popular culture studies. Brent M. S. Campney University of Texas Rio...

Shining a Light on Hidden Collections and Catholic News Media

Shining a Light on Hidden Collections and Catholic News Media Marian J. Barber38 As director of the Catholic Archives of Texas, a statewide repository of material from the early sixteenth century to the present, I am acutely aware of the many issues involved in carrying out our mission of collecting, preserving, and making available as appropriate thousands of records, photographs, books, and artifacts that document the Catholic experience in Texas. Collecting actually comes fairly easily, but preserving material and making it available to church offices, individual Catholics, academic researchers, genealogists, and others pose greater challenges. Digitization offers a promising option for meeting them. This discussion will focus on three ongoing efforts to use digitization to preserve fragile or deteriorating items and make those materials and others easily accessible to researchers with limited resources for visiting far-flung collections: programs implemented by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the University of North Texas’s Portal to Texas History, and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance. Council on Library and Information Resources The Council on Library and Information Resources, or CLIR, is an “independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.” The Council often works with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further the foundation’s goal of creating and disseminating new knowledge by serving as a re-granting agency. From 2008 to 2014, it administered the Mellon-funded Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program that made 129 cataloging grants totaling over $27.5 million. Catholic institutions were not frequent recipients, but in 2009, Marquette University Libraries received a grant of $149,964 for [End Page 17] the Catholic Social Action Access Project, a collaboration with St. Catherine University and the Catholic University of America.39 In 2015–2016 Mellon funded a new project, “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials.” Again CLIR serves as the re-granting agency. For individual applicants, grants range from $50,000 to $250,000; for collaborations, $50,000 to $500,000. They distributed slightly less than $4 million in 2015 and slightly more than that amount in 2016. The goals include development of protocols for digitizing material and increasing access that can be replicated nationally and internationally. Free access is a very important element, though not obligatory. The new program places even stronger emphasis on collaboration than the cataloging project. In its first year, the 18 funded projects included a $499,086 grant to the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, including Villanova University, for “Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward A Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts” held in member institutions’ collections.40 Villanova is also a partner in one of the 17 projects funded in 2016, a $448,893 effort to document a publisher of nickel and dime novels. Other 2016 projects not directly involving Catholic institutions but of potential interest to researchers on Catholic subjects include programs on the American labor movement, executions in the United States from 1608-2002, Cuban-American relations, archeological finds in Honduras, and home movies and amateur films by women. Recipients of 2017 grants were to be announced in July of this year. CLIR notes that program funding must be renewed annually, but that they expect it to continue for several years.41 Also of interest to Catholic archivists should be CLIR’s “Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections,” an effort built around a Mellon-funded series of six 90-minute recorded webinars and a resource library on “techniques and best practices for increasing the visibility, usability, and sustainability of collections in the gallery, library, archive, and museum community.” CLIR has also received funding from Mellon for “Recordings at Risk: Digital Reformatting of Audio/Film/Video,” offering $2.3 million over four rounds in 2017 and 2018. Two rounds remain; Catholic archives with rare or threatened recordings in any format should consider approaching CLIR about developing proposals.42 [End Page 18] Portal to Texas History The Portal to Texas History, a project of the University of North Texas Libraries, is one of many similar efforts undertaken in the United States by libraries...

"Barrowby", Boys’ Books, and How to Make Literature

ABSTRACT: In what is commonly understood to be an autobiographical note, Fernando Pessoa wrote, "Those books which are called boys’ books and deal with exciting experiences I cared little for." In fact, as a young adolescent in Durban, Fernando not only read a lot of "boys’ books," he also tried to write one of his own: Os Rapazes de Barrowby (The Boys of Barrowby) lifted its title, the names of some characters, and various structural details from The Barrowboy Boys, serialized in a British magazine for boys in 1903. Pessoa completely changed the story, however, and partly subverted the genre. KEYWORDS: boys’ books, Barrowby, story papers, dime novels, O Palrador, Durban

Drinking the Elixir of Nostalgia: Reading Annie Proulx’s “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick”

<p>This essay attempts to interpret contemporary American Writer, Annie Proulx’s short story “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick,” included in <em>Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories II</em>. Applying related historical, sociological, and cultural data and researches, the essay approaches the story by close reading. By exploring the protagonist, Gilbert’s quest for the past values and ethics of the Old West in the contemporary world, this essay presents Proulx’s ambiguous attitude towards those who abides to the old values, despite the sweeping changes. The author argues that Proulxhas shown her views of the oft-discussed issue—nostalgia or progress—in literature, and brought it to a new and profound existential level—a to-be or not-to-be business. At the same time, Proulx has deconstructed American “dime novels” and exposed the delusive nature of this Old West inheritance. Being criticized to be the “new voice”of American Western literature, Proulx has revived the Western fiction and enriched its connotation.</p>

Dostoyevsky’s «Crime and Punishment» and dime novels

Dostoyevsky’s «Crime and Punishment» and dime novels

Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918 by Paul B. Ringel

Reviewed by: Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918 by Paul B. Ringel Gary Cross Commercializing Childhood: Children’s Magazines, Urban Gentility, and the Ideal of the Child Consumer in the United States, 1823–1918. By Paul B. Ringel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. ix + 255 pp. Cloth $90, paper $28.95. Like many books, the subtitle of this book tells the reader much more about it than the main title. This is a skillful history of a series of Boston- and New York–based magazines designed for children of middle-class and affluent families. Their editors followed the division between orthodox and liberal wings of genteel, largely Protestant-inspired cultures and their differing responses to commercialization in the nineteenth century. Paul Ringel explores these different wings of northeastern American gentility by contrasting the editorial policies of a succession of these children’s magazines. While the pioneering Nathaniel Willis’s Youth’s Companion adhered to conservative evangelical values, stressing childhood sin, Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany served up [End Page 523] a more liberal array of stories, fostering self-improvement. Ringel sees signs of adaptation to the commercial in Willis’s increasing sentimentality (especially regarding women) and Child’s appeal to exoticism and child empowerment (even though her support of abolition was unacceptable to the conservative parents of her readers). Next he contrasts Daniel Ford’s midcentury editorship of Youth’s Companion with the more liberal children’s magazine, St. Nicholas, led by Mary Mapes Dodge. Ford shifted from the allegoric stories of Willis to more realistic but still cautionary fiction (“genteel sensational tales”) that avoided the excesses of the dime novels. Dodge went further in breaking from the conservative effort to protect children from popular commercial literature without abandoning genteel standards. In the final phase of his story, the Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas were obliged to address a range of popular appeals (masculine virility and technological optimism, for example) but also new problems (like the rise of city temptations and peer groups). Ringel argues that these magazines declined by 1918, in part because of their success in “legitimizing children’s integration in the nation’s cultures of consumption and leisure” (14), but primarily, and more persuasively, because of the decline of genteel culture in the face of the appeals of the commercial and the popular. This work is skillful at identifying exemplary illustrations of differences and trends in these magazines, and draws on a wide range of archival sources to inform us about the background and motives of the succession of editors. This is a fine account of the complex history of literary gentility as expressed in an effort to reach out to children readers and especially their parents. The book illuminates changing attitudes toward children and definitions of childhood—for example, by recognizing popular acceptance of an extended childhood in stories directed to older youth. Yet this book only tangentially addresses its title, the commercialization of childhood. It’s true that these magazines were commercial efforts requiring some accommodation to popular and presumably commercial taste, but the commercial, for-profit character of these publications does not say much about introducing children to consumer culture beyond a restrained form of sensational literature. The “commercial” is treated very abstractly with no real discussion of the advent of a wide range of commercial influences—mass-produced games, toys, and dolls; dime “museums”; circuses; amusement parks; magic lantern shows; movies; and child-focused commercialized Christmas (though Dodge’s interest in the “domestic consumerism” of the holiday is mentioned briefly [137]). The stories that he reviews reflect changing attitudes toward children’s moral capacities, agency, and relationships with adult authority. All this is germane to the issue of how these magazines reflected or impacted [End Page 524] child-rearing trends, but this doesn’t say much about the changing relationship between children and commerce. Did the magazines shift from the expectation that children save and be charitable toward an embrace of children’s delight in pursuing consumer goods? Did the stories show a trend toward themes involving consumer choice and deferred gratification? What about advertising trends...