Peyton Place Research Articles

PUBLIC VIRTUES AND PRIVATE PLEASURES: HOW TV CULTURE EMERGED IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA

Television represented the transformative technology in the 20th century, and it has also served as a major social and cultural force for modernization after World War II, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In socialist countries television was closely connected with future-oriented ideology, and aimed to provide the democratization of knowledge, promotion of socialist values and development of socialist citizenry. The beginning of TV broadcast in socialist Yugoslavia in 1958 gave way to the gradual development of TV culture during the sixties and seventies, the overall impact of which on the subjectivities and everyday lives of the viewers was undeniable. The aim of this paper is to briefly outline the context in which television culture in socialist Yugoslavia emerged and achieved momentum, pinpointing two periods: the penetration of TV into small places and villages during the sixties and the socio-cultural influence and ramifications of the broadcast of "Peyton Place" in the early seventies.

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin E. Field

Reviewed by: Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction by Robin E. Field Jerrica Jordan WRITING THE SURVIVOR: THE RAPE NOVEL IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION, by Robin E. Field. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2020. 256 pp. $120 hardback. Robin E. Field's monograph Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction begins with a historical look at how the idea of rape consciousness and rape culture began, using the infamous rape scene from the film Gone with the Wind (1939) to set the tone for how representations of rape conditioned American viewers to downplay women's claims of sexual assault. Field's next example, Grace Metalious's novel Peyton Place (1956), depicts a writer empathizing toward characters experiencing rape and incest; however Field argues that the book's use of voyeurism did more to alienate real-life survivors from coming forward for help and assistance. These two examples help set the scene for those interested in how American culture desensitized reactions to claims of rape and sexual assualt and foreground the literary landscape that writers used to create societal awareness. The chapters of Writing the Survivor, archived by decade, move across the twentieth century to our present day in order to demonstrate the trajectory of silence, awareness, and need for survival regarding rape in both literature and culture. The chronological organization of Field's book creates an easy-to-follow structure for her readers. Field outlines the literary history of rape culture in her lengthy introduction, using a dual historical and cultural approach to understand how reading audiences internalized and responded to claims of sexual assault. In the five chapters that follow, Field pairs research from each selected decade with a close reading of the rape literature from the time period, beginning with the first chapter, "Rape Consciousness: From Activism to Text," which uses the 1970s as its archive. Field argues that this decade became the impetus for the anti-rape movement, beginning with activists' successfully redefining rape as a response of violence versus desire. As a result, Field claims, much of the literature that proliferated within the 1970s—including memoirs authored by Billie Holiday and Maya Angelou—place their focus on the experiences of the rape victim. [End Page 180] As the book progresses, Field complements her chronological organization by labeling the discussed female (and male) characters into three separate types: rape victims, rape survivors, or rape victim-survivors. As Field explains, "Many of the rape novels of the 1980s extend the rape narrative beyond the incident of assault to detail how women recover from rape" (p. 111). These different characterizations, she claims, depend on how readers understood rape and its repercussions within their particular climate. Victims, Field argues, await acknowledgement from their community, while survivors have entered the healing phase. In her usage of "victim-survivor," Field explains how the evolution of rape fiction has created a place of ambivalence where the recurrence and remembrance of one's trauma may conflict with the recovery process; Field argues that the third designation is necessary, as it provides textual reaffirmation of real-life individuals' personal dignity. Perhaps most notable about this book is Field's historical and contextual analysis of how writers of color and ethnicity navigate female reporting of rape in the third chapter, "'The Victim Demands Narrative': Writing the Perspective of the Rape Victim-Survivor in the Long 1980s." This chapter offers a glimpse at how literary examples of rape survivors reveal authors' decisions to balance political versus personal concerns. For these writers (and their characters), Field claims, the political becomes personal. Through the works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Sandra Cisneros, and Bharati Mukherjee, Field's argument suggests that characters' choices to report their rape—or remain silent—are not simply dependent on their reactions to rape; instead, as Field elucidates, whole communities often feel the punishment if and when a woman decides to come forward about her sexual abuse. In her close reading of Walker's Meridian (1976), for example, Field ties the title character's denouncement of her white friend's rape accusation to the probable anti-black violence such a...

From Peyton Plantation to Peyton Place: Gothic Tropes in Grace Metalious's Infamous New England Novel

From Peyton Plantation to Peyton Place: Gothic Tropes in Grace Metalious's Infamous New England Novel

Tools of the Trade: Working Women in Texts from the Sexual Revolution

“Despite the trend toward stay-at-home mothering in the post-WWII decades, few popular women’s narratives…focus on the domesticated woman, with the notable exceptions of Grace Metalious’s scandalous bestseller Peyton Place (1956), Sue Kaufman’s acerbic social commentary Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), and Betty Friedan’s liberal-feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique (1963). Herein, Friedan deplored the suburban entrapment of middle-class women and argued vigorously throughout her own career for women’s improved access to the paid professional sector. Due to the influence of this text and related outcries from the nascent feminist second wave, stories about women’s search for meaningful careers in conflict with traditional desires for spouse and children left their mark on this era.”

Black Panthers in Peyton Place

This article uses the prime-time drama Peyton Place (ABC, 1964–67) to examine the challenges of racial integration in the serial narrative. Peyton Place broke ground as a prime-time serial, but declined in popularity by its fourth year on the air. An African-American family was added to the story canvas as part of a strategy to revive audience interest by exploring stories with social relevance. I use the archived papers of the show’s writers and producers to examine the negotiations behind the racial integration of a continuing drama that established its success with a white cast of characters.

Unbuttoning America: A Biography of “Peyton Place

Journal Article Unbuttoning America: A Biography of “Peyton Place Get access By Ardis Cameron. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015. xvi, 223 pp. $24.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 103, Issue 1, June 2016, Pages 254–255, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaw130 Published: 01 June 2016

Working Girls: Femininity and Entrapment in Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966) and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956) are novels that have long exerted a powerful hold on the popular imagination. The bestselling Peyton Place was adapted into a successful film in 1957 before becoming an iconic television series, running from 1964 to 1969. Valley of the Dolls was similarly re-imagined in two films, Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which, even today, retain a cult following. These books are typically remembered for their scandalous bringing to light of such ‘taboo’ issues as adultery, abortion, female sexuality and sexual abuse. But this article suggests that Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls are equally preoccupied with a sympathetic examination of the role of women in the post-war workplace. In both of these novels, the process of female self-fashioning is integrally related to a woman's entry into the workforce, and to the making and controlling of her own money. But this entry into the male-dominated workforce is inherently fraught with danger, and Metalious and Susann expose some of the myriad ways in which the so-called ‘American Dream’ is contingent on the entrapment, suppression and regulation of various forms of female desire and agency.

The continuing story: Experiments with serial narrative in 1960s prime-time television

Abstract This article examines innovations in prime-time narratives in US prime-time television in the 1960s, using archival evidence to trace the goals, concerns and conflicts of screenwriters and producers on series including The Defenders (CBS, 1961-65), The Fugitive (ABC, 1963-67), Peyton Place (ABC, 1964-69), and Dr. Kildare (NBC, 1961-66). During this decade, television writers and producers innovated in response to outside concerns regarding the content of popular episodic programmes, and as a method of encouraging audience engagement and habit viewership. Historical evidence demonstrates that prime-time writers specifically sought to make a distinction between prime-time continuing narratives and those that aired during the daytime hours, in order to elevate what they considered to be a new form of television storytelling.

The Entrepreneurial Experiences of a Jamaican Posse in the South Bronx

This chapter extends the prior research on gang members as entrepreneurs and in particular seeks to understand the members of the Peyton Place Posse as entrepreneurs in the illegal narcotics market, as they pursued their quest to achieve the American Dream. Specifically, we explore the reasons for Posse members entering the illicit drug market and review their successes and failures in pursuit of capital accumulation. We begin with a synopsis of strain theory, and how gangs operate in the illegal drug market. The foregoing is followed by a brief discussion of the characteristics of the Bronx, NY. Next, we present a synopsis of the Peyton Place Posse. Finally, we use strain theory to explain the Posse’s entrepreneurial experiences and outcomes in the illegal narcotics market.

Selling The Continuing Story Of Peyton Place: Negotiating The Content Of The Primetime Serial

In network continuity acceptance reports from 1959, an editor casually referenced the best-selling Grace Metalious novel Peyton Place, claiming that although Hollywood could adapt the basic storyli...

A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction. By Evan Brier. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 200 pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4207-2.)

This book explores the cultural situation of postwar American fiction by examining Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), and Grace Metalious's Peyton Place (1956). The spread of mass culture, Evan Brier argues, required authors and publishers to reposition the novel as a genre that asserted the separateness of art from commerce while enabling them to exploit new marketing opportunities. Each of Brier's examples involves a version of that paradox. Bowles bypassed his William Morris Agency agent, Helen Strauss, by taking his manuscript to James Laughlin at the New Directions Publishing Corporation. But, to sell the book, Laughlin cannily mobilized Tennessee Williams's review praising Bowles's anticareerism. Thus distance from a mass audience became the basis for courting it. Bradbury's characters lament the existence of too many readers, yet the publisher Ian Ballantine enlarged Bradbury's public with a paperback edition of Fahrenheit 451. By endorsing a title change, Wilson's publisher Richard Simon obscured the rebellion against conformity that Wilson actually depicted but Wilson himself capitulated to corporate demands. Peyton Place resembled a prewar best seller more than later blockbusters because the advertising executive Aaron Sussman promoted it the way he had earlier sold James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).

Changing Relations: Achieving Intimacy in a Time of Social Transition ‐ by Robin Goodwin

Changing Relations: Achieving Intimacy in a Time of Social Transition. Robin Goodwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. 221 pp. ISBN 9780521842044. $90.00 (cloth). In his book, Changing Relations: Achieving Intimacy in a Time of Social Transition, Robin Goodwin describes how social changes affect relationships. Given the current economic crisis, Goodwin's book is a timely analysis of how such changes shape our ability to establish and sustain personal relationships. Research on personal relationships has a 20- to 30-year history, and Goodwin synthesizes a great deal of this research from a sociological and psychological perspective. He creates a framework to guide our understanding of how previous research findings can be explained through the lens of social change. Goodwin goes on to apply that model to the development of intimacy, to friendship networks, to sexual relationships, and to marital and family relationships. Goodwin's framework is based on the premise that society is ever changing and that people adapt and respond to those changes. He suggests that two main types of social change occur and affect relationships: (a) rapid and direct and (b) gradual and indirect. Further, he notes that either type of change occurs within the context of mediating and moderating factors. Social changes that are rapid may directly create new limitations and norms for relationships, which then alter beliefs about and behaviors within relationships. Goodwin offers the example of the one-child policy in China. This rapid change created direct limitations on families, which ultimately led to a greater valuation of male children, thus altering family dynamics. In contrast to rapid and direct social change, Goodwin suggests that some change is gradual and indirect. Here, the focus is on changes in values and beliefs, which may arise due to the influence of powerful groups or leaders. Such social change may also be due to technological advances and modernization. Modernization is a gradual process, the effects of which are seen over generations. For example, we have seen significant changes in dating and the process of finding a life partner, partly due to technological advances and associated values. Although not mentioned in the book, we may in the future see similar changes in the development of intimacy and friendship as a result of social networking sites such as Facebook. While he acknowledges some of the changes associated with modernization, Goodwin questions whether modernization is a monolithic influence affecting all of our relationships negatively. He notes that in reality, there are simple convergences in values and relationship behaviors across the world (p. 42) and that simply contrasting traditional and modern ways of life is too simplistic. These insights are especially valuable because mainstream media would have us believe that modernization is bringing forth bankrupt moral codes and the demise of the family. Goodwin would argue that, yes, changes are occurring, but those changes are really adaptations to environmental conditions, and thus they themselves will be influenced by subsequent societal changes. In other words, it is not all downhill from here, and we are not all living in Peyton Place. Fleshing out his model and placing it firmly in the realm of current contextual thinking about human development, Goodwin describes mediators and moderators that may affect the extent to which social change influences relationships and categorizes them into three different levels. At the individual level, he notes that individual differences dictate that not all social change will affect everyone, and that people will be affected differently. For some, major change that is rapid and direct might be experienced as negative, but for others it may be positive. Psychological factors are part of this individual level. For example, those with more effective coping mechanisms will adapt to change more readily, as might those whose personalities render them more open to new experiences. …

A novel marketplace: mass culture, the book trade, and postwar American fiction

Introduction: Selling the Novel in the Age of Mass Culture Chapter 1. Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: The Making and Marketing of The Sheltering Sky Chapter 2. The Incalculable Value of Reading: Fahrenheit 451 and the Paperback Assault on Mass Culture Chapter 3. Synergy and the Novelist: Simon & Schuster Time, Inc. and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit Chapter 4. From Novel to Blockbuster: Peyton Place and the Narrative of Cultural Decline Chapter 5. 1959 and Beyond: Mergers, Acquisitions, and Norman Mailer Epilogue: Novels Today: Oprah Winfrey, Jonathan Franzen, and the Long Tail Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments

Leopold and Shinner

76 PEGGY SHINNER LEOPOLD AND SHINNER 1 J une 2, 1957: “Should Leopold Be Paroled?” The Chicago Sunday Tribune wanted your opinion. So did Nathan Leopold. Leopold, who, along with Richard Loeb, murdered Bobby Franks in 1924. It was dubbed a “thrill kill,” murder for kicks, “the crime of the century.” Leopold and Loeb: young, smart, wealthy, educated, Jewish, homosexual. At the time of the murder, they were nineteen and eighteen years old, respectively, students at the University of Chicago, and lovers . Loeb was killed in prison in 1936. Now, after thirty-three years, Nathan Leopold would soon be up for parole. “Expiation ? Atonement? Whether I have paid my debt to society? . . . Other people will have to decide.” Other people did. Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason detective series, and author of the introduction to Leopold’s prison memoir, Life Plus 99 Years, wrote, “Here is a man who [is trying to] live down the tragic mistake of his youth. . . . Will society meet him halfway?” Carl Sandburg invited him to his home. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet (Kup) expressed confidence that he would make an “exemplary parolee.” And, noting that his support was not limited to people of influence, Leopold said, “Little John Smith and Mrs. Mary Jones . . . are writing me every day.” My mother was one of the Mrs. Mary Joneses. Harriet Shinner , née Alter. She wrote a letter in support of Leopold’s parole. She was thirty-three, married with two children, ages six and two. Paying monthly mortgage payments on a two-bedroom brick ranch in Peterson Park on the northwest side of Chicago. She wore housecoats, monitored her weight, smoked Marlboros, played mah-jongg. Worried about money. Read popular novels (Peyton Place made the New York Times best seller list for fiftynine weeks in 1956–57). She had fair skin, a sharp nose, melancholy eyes. She was easily hurt. Born in 1924, the same year 77 Shinner as the murder; Jewish, like both the victim and the perpetrators (although Loeb’s mother was Catholic; thus, according to some, Loeb was not Jewish); and her husband’s name, my father’s, was also Nathan. As far as I know, she wasn’t particularly civicminded ; she wasn’t a member of the League of Women Voters or a volunteer at a soup kitchen, nor did she write letters to the editor about local ordinances, like some women did. She wasn’t that kind of woman. Nor was she, as far as I know, the kind of woman who would watch the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) hearings during the spring of 1951, while she was pregnant with me, but, as she later told me, she did. I know that my mother wrote to Nathan Leopold because I have the letter that Leopold wrote to her. It’s addressed to Mrs. Nathan Shinner, a common erasure of self my mother subscribed to, I suspect, without hesitation. When I was at Stateville , making every effort to win my release, I promised myself that, once freed, I would send personal replies to all who wrote me. In prison I was restricted in ways that made general correspondence impossible, and I longed for the time when I might show my gratitude to all who were friendly enough to write a stranger. It has taken a long time, I fear, to get around to this letter, but finally the day has come. Finally the day has come. Did she await his letter with as much anticipation as he apparently felt before he wrote it? The letter is postmarked Puerto Rico—where Leopold went to work as a medical technician— and stamped with a soaring airplane, whose skyward trajectory seems to highlight the eager flight toward its destination. Postage was seven cents; the name of the return addressee simply n l. The raised punch of the typewritten letters, pounded, it appears, with steady force, comes through to the back of the envelope. I found the letter in a drawer in the hutch in our dining room when I was snooping around for secrets. It was an idle kind of snooping, a listless looking around, propelled by a subterranean, undirected...

“Do You Love Mother, Norman?”: Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Metalious's Peyton Place as Sources for Robert Bloch's Psycho

“Do You Love Mother, Norman?”: Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Metalious's <i>Peyton Place</i> as Sources for Robert Bloch's <i>Psycho</i>

Money and quality in health care: Muttered medical musings from the back of the class

Money and quality in health care: Muttered medical musings from the back of the class

Lolita in Peyton Place: highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow novels of the 1950s

Separating popular fiction into lowbrow and middlebrow, Wood (U. of Wisconsin, River Falls) argues that lowbrow, like highbrow, evolves from folkloric tradition and contains messages about how to find a satisfying niche in the social order. Middlebrow, on the other hand, evolves from myth tradit

Necessary American Fictions: Popular Literature of the 1950s (review)

Reviewed by: Necessary American Fictions: Popular Literature of the 1950s Martin Light William Darby . Necessary American Fictions: Popular Literature of the 1950s. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1987. 397 pp. $35.00 cloth; pb. $16.95. In his introductory chapter to Necessary American Fictions, William Darby says that his intention is to examine fifty bestselling novels (along with filmed versions of some of them) "as evidence of . . . cultural values . . . which they reaffirm and often 'sanctify.'" Because they are expressions of popular culture (mass ideas and feelings) in the 1950s, they are necessary to our full understanding of the decade. At the beginning Darby lists several beliefs that characterize the period: emotion has primacy over reason; problems "have solutions which the individual can discover"; "the ordinary man can become a hero"; "natural outdoor freedom" is superior to "unnatural indoor confinement." He relates these to such topics as politics, war, love, adolescence, and identity. The 1950s, as he reminds us, are usually thought of as a casual and pacific time, overseen by an avuncular President Eisenhower. Yet such disturbing events as the closing of the war in Korea and the investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy occurred then. In addition, the decade already felt and was beginning to articulate latent anxieties and disquieting apprehension of what would burst forth in the following years. Thus popular novels dealing with both World War Two and Korea—the atomic bomb, heavy military and civilian losses, a victory, and a compromised settlement—anticipate the struggle in Vietnam; Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s set the scene for racial violence; Russia's successes with nuclear weapons and space ventures intensified fear of communism; and the Pill brought on a sexual revolution. These tensions pressed for an outlet. For his literary examples, Darby draws upon the work of Spillane, Wouk, Michener, Uris, Metalious, James Jones, and other writers. His book is large. Fifty novels seem to me more than enough; fewer, or compression, would have served better. He relies heavily on plot summary, giving us, I mink, more detail and less analysis than we need. Although popular culture's ability to reflect or to teach results most often from magnitude and weight, it is not a full recreation of the details of Mickey Spillane's novels that we could find useful. Rather, it is, as Darby himself remarks, the general thrust, the melodrama and stereotype, the accumulation and force put upon characters and events as they become metaphor and symbol, that reveal their necessary function. We learn from the book what led Mike Hammer (and other "cynical urban knights") to act out our wish-fulfillments and our fears. Hammer sought truth and punished corruption so as to even the score with bureaucratic incompetents, deceptive women, and communists. From Uris's Battle Cry readers took reassurance about the toughness and readiness of their military. In The Revolt of Mamie Stover they found actions and speeches against the impending civil rights and women's liberation movements. Peyton Place suggested to many teenagers "that being an adult was more exciting and more bitter than they imagined." [End Page 246] While condensing his literary examples, Darby might have somewhat expanded his account of contextual realities. Regrettably, he set aside two interesting arguments that are potential in his subject—whether bestsellers "reflect, follow or create popular taste" and whether they reveal cultural values in ways high art cannot. Nonetheless, he has brought to our attention the kinds of affirmations and sanctifications that we desire from popular books in order to help us know our times, past and present. Copyright © 1988 Purdue Research Foundation

A Janus-Text: Realism, Fantasy, and Nabokov's Lolita

A Janus-Text:Realism, Fantasy, and Nabokov's Lolita Lance Olsen (bio) Reality is a very subjective affair. —Nabokov (Strong Opinions 10) Vladimir Nabokov has called Lolita, whose manuscript he almost chucked into an incinerator once in 1950 and again in 1951, his "special favorite" (Strong Opinions 15) and said that of all his works he had "the most affection" for it (Appel, Interview 44). It was the only English novel he valued enough to translate into Russian, which he did in 1967. But when it first came out in Paris (1955), New York (1958), and London (1959), it certainly did not look like many reviewers agreed with him. Although it headed up to the top of the bestseller list and stayed there for a year, and although—contrary to the impression one has reading more recent Nabokov criticism, which tends to overemphasize Lolita's being turned down by four American publishers only to be picked up by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press in Paris, known for its publication of Jean Genet and pornography—John Hollander, Howard Nemerov, Lionel Trilling, and Kingsley Amis, among others, gave it strong positive reviews, many were less than impressed by what they read, and many were downright hostile. Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review, for example, said Lolita was "not one of the more memorable novels" (38), and Robert Hatch [End Page 115] in Nation said it was "not a very inventive book—beyond the initial audacity" (563). E. F. Walbridge in Library Journal thought "thousands of library patrons conditioned to near-incest by 'Peyton Place' may take this book in stride. However, better read before buying. Although the writer prides himself on using no obscene words, he succeeds only too well conveying his meaning without them" (2183), which is almost glowing compared to what Orville Prescott thought in The New York Times. He said "there are two equally serious reasons why it isn't worth any adult reader's attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive"—which has affinities with what Riley Hughes wrote in Catholic World: "[the] very subject makes it a book to which grave objection must be raised. . . . As a study of unnatural infatuation, of a man and mind obsessed, it might be said to have a certain clinical authority. But the aura of evil, the implications of a decadence universally accepted and shared—this is a romp which does not amuse" (72). At least part of what all these negative—and strangely charming—reviews may be responding to is the pulse of the fantastic that beats at the heart of Lolita, and to fantasy's general tendency on a thematic stratum to present a culture with the very forces it must repress in order to remain successful and functioning. One of the dark strengths of fantasy is that it presents a culture with that which it cannot stand, possibilities of alternative universes, possibilities of taboo—in Lolita indications of incest, sadism, masochism, murder, nympholepsy, and so forth. That is, as Roger Caillois comments in Au Coeur du Fantastique, "the fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality" (qtd. in Todorov 26). It becomes a mode of narrative illegality which is, as Hélène Cixous notices, "a subtle invitation to transgression" (200, my translation). In other words, the theme of the fantastic is an exploration of the limits of civilization, which along the way dismembers humanist and religious sanctions concerning what is "proper," "decent," "acceptable," and so on in order to interrogate them, to place them under erasure. Now I do not mean to suggest by this that Lolita is a work of pure fantasy. As Kathryn Hume convincingly argues, there probably is no such beast. At the root of Western culture a bias has arisen that tends to separate literature along a mimetic-fantastic axis. Plato banished the fantastic from his Republic. Aristotle decided to judge that good literature was that which best mimed reality. Because of this, in many texts the fantastic has been placed almost out of sight...

Book Reviews

Journal of American CultureVolume 4, Issue 4 p. 183-188 Book Reviews First published: Winter 1981 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1981.0404_183.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract TELEVISION AS AN INSTRUMENT OF TERROR: ESSAYS ON THE MEDIA, POPULAR CULTURE AND EVERYDAY LIFE, by Arthur Asu Berger. ROLLING THUNDER LOGBOOK. By Sum Shepard. A GENERATION IN MOTION: POPULAR MUSIC AND CULTURE IN THE SIXTIES by David Pichaske. INSIDE PEYTON PLACE: THE LIFE OF GRACE METALIOUS. By Emily Toth. Volume4, Issue4Winter 1981Pages 183-188 RelatedInformation