Pulp Magazines Research Articles

Медный лик древней Америки: репрезентация мезоамериканских цивилизаций в американском pulp-журнале Weird tales в межвоенный период

In the Interwar period different form of Ancient civilization had been one the most frequent theme in American popular culture. Lost Indian civilization wasn’t exception, but this is-sue is still poorly investigate in the popular culture’s field. The article examines, based on John Cavelti's theory of for-mular fiction and John Saler’s “imaginary worlds”, the repre-sentation of pre-Columbian civilizations in one of the most significant American pulp magazines, Weird tales, and the ways in which their heritage is appropriated by American popular culture. We come to conclusion that representation of pre-Colombian indian civilization was within the general nar-rative of the ancient (like Egypt and Babylon), but had differ-ence in tropes. This concerned attention to the phenomenon of sacrifices. Also, the authors were anxious about issues of race, since the racist view of Latin Americans was a constitu-tive stereotype for many Americans. To prevent this problem from interfering with the appropriation of the Indian ancient heritage as uniquely American, the writers excluded the in-termediary in the person of a modern resident of Mexico. Mexico was represented as a poor, unstable country, just an epigone of its magnificent ancestors.

Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines by Gregory A. Daddis

<i>Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines</i> by Gregory A. Daddis

"That's me": Ruby Fisher from "A Piece of News" as Eudora Welty's Selfie

This article re-examines Eudora Welty's "A Piece of News" by building on previous readings that have foregrounded either the protagonist Ruby Fisher's victimhood or her sexual self-possession in order to propose two points: first, that this story is not just about Ruby Fisher's powers of ideation but about the idea of imaginative formation; second, Ruby Fisher is best understood as Welty's literary double, a somewhat satirical self-portrait of the author at the beginning of her craft. In this story, Ruby Fisher imagines herself as the female victim, and these imaginings recycle male-controlled myths of femininity popularized by mass media, including newspapers and the pulp magazines prevalent at the time of Welty's writing and which she embeds in other stories from A Curtain of Green. In this vein, Ruby's performance, staged only for herself, anticipates later twentieth-century female visual artists who also interrogate the act and artifice of self-representation, artists such as Cindy Sherman.

Cornell Woolrich and Radio Noir

Of all the writers to transition from pulp magazines to noir movies, Cornell Woolrich was by far the most prolific. The heyday of ‘classic’ Hollywood film noir saw not only seventeen films based on Woolrich properties but also over seventy radio dramas and a large number of television adaptations that would continue into the early 1960s. Drawing on a range of critical and archival materials, this article assesses Woolrich's contribution to radio drama in the classic noir era and explores several adaptations of his 1936 story ‘The Night Reveals’, one of the most popular selections on the acclaimed CBS anthology series Suspense (1942–62).

Beyond the Horizon

Beyond the Horizon

Alone on the Colorado

Alone on the Colorado

Advertising in Popular Culture: Fredric Brown's "Pi in the Sky"

Abstract: Advertising in Popular Culture articles provide an in-depth discussion of how a text, such as a television show, film, or short story, represents and reflects on advertising's place in society and culture. In this article, a group of scholars talk about Fredric Brown's short story "Pi in the Sky," which appeared in the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in early 1945. Panelists provide a close reading of the story, discussing many topics: the cultural, political, and social context during and after World War II; the media and publishing environment during and after World War II; how the story compares to other science fiction and literary representations of advertising; what the story says about advertising and science; an analysis of prominent characters in the story; representations of soap; what the story says about the tactics advertisers use to draw attention to products; the meanings and significance of the story's title; advice on how to use the story in the classroom; and advice for practitioners.

Doc Savage Saves the World: A Pop Culture Origin Story for US Modernization and Development, 1933–1949

This article contends that important scripts for US-led modernization were trademarked not by political and academic elites of the Cold War era, but rather by low-brow cultural producers of the New Deal period. It pinpoints key characterizations, motivations, plotlines, and settings associated with international development in the long-running pulp magazine series starring “Doc Savage” (1933–1949). Through historical analysis and close readings, the article offers a fresh account of how US audiences came to imagine technical assistance as a proper course for American power while also revealing paradoxes underpinning the modernization agenda's overt commitments to race neutrality and self-determination.

“Whatever it is that compels her to write so seldom”

In the pulp magazine period (1926-1946), science fiction’s publishing practices excluded female authors from the burgeoning genre. Using a network analysis of over 2,400 authors and 14,000 stories, this article demonstrates that women’s publication numbers in science fiction went down over the pulp period. Women, unlike their male colleagues, were published in ways that made it nearly impossible to gain economic stability and prestige in the pulps. The consolidation of sf into a marketing genre thus came at the expense of a female sf community who troubled the purity of a newly exclusive field.

"Without Even His Hat Took Off": Faulkner's Sanctuary

"Without Even His Hat Took Off":Faulkner's Sanctuary William Brevda In his infamous introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, William Faulkner stated that he wrote the original version of the novel just "to make money" (v). Angry and frustrated about his difficulties getting Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury published and being told that Sartoris was not going to sell, Faulkner decided to write a more commercial novel: "I took time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine" (vi). Although Faulkner did not identify these trends, it is safe to say that they were the gangster phenomenon, the vogue of Freudianism, movies, sex, and fashion. Faulkner exploited popular trends to make money, but he also parodied them for a laugh. Sanctuary is primarily a gangster novel, but it is also a criticism of the artificiality of modern life. The attributes of Popeye are the attributes of a material object. Faulkner's gangster has no self that is separate from his things or from the current trends out of which he has been fashioned. The indifference of Popeye and Temple Drake to their own corruption is the indifference of the inanimate world in their lack of a conscience. Sanctuary is a gangster Waste Land, as Faulkner might have expected even a person in the "Sahara of the Bozart" (Mencken) to recognize, breeding gangsters out of the dead land. Sanctuary depicts a world of dead matter and spiritless "already dead" people (Sanctuary 115). Pop-eye is the most "thing-like" character, but all the characters, as I argue in this essay, are hat-like (Adamowski 32). How would we know the gangster without his gat and his hat? The gat is important, but the hat is essential. Writing a gangster novel would have seemed like a good way to make money in 1929 when Faulkner began writing Sanctuary. Damon [End Page 393] Runyon's first four Guys and Dolls stories were published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1929. That year Donald Henderson Clarke's Louis Beretti sold 11,000 copies and another 99,000 when the movie version Born Reckless was released in 1930. Armitage Trail wrote Scarface in 1929. It was published in 1930 and released as a film in 1932. Also published in 1929 were Frank L. Packard's The Big Shot and W. R. Bur-nett's Little Caesar and award-winning short story "Dressed to Kill." The pulp magazine Gangster Stories began publication in 1929. All an author needed in 1929 to make a killing in the popular market was a tough Italian gangster, or so it must have seemed to Faulkner, who needed money for his impending marriage. Popeye's ethnicity is a pop culture stereotype: he is pop Eyetalian. Faulkner's writing of Sanctuary coincided with Al "Scarface" Capone's well publicized reign as the "King of Gangland" from the mid-1920s to 1931 (Enright 85). On February 14, 1929, one month after Faulkner began work on Sanctuary, the media coverage of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre turned Capone into a national celebrity. In March 1930, Capone, the personification of the gangster myth, made the cover of Time Magazine (nine years before Faulkner did). That same year, Fred D. Pasley popularized the Capone legend in Al Capone: The Biography of a Self-Made Man. Popeye is not Al Capone, and even Capone said that he did not belong in Pasley's book "any more than I belong in a book by Horatio Alger" (Ruth 118), but Capone is the archetype of the literary and cinematic gangster. When Faulkner "took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends," it would not have taken him long to identify them and to see how they were related (Introduction vi). In a 1930 story by Runyon, a character based on Walter Winchell uses Freudian lingo to call the public's obsession with gangsters "an underworld complex" ("Social Error" 70). This fascination with "gangster chic" had a lot to do with...

The Shadow and the dual-identity avenger tradition in American popular fiction

Abstract A secret identity is one of the definitional characteristics of comic-book superheroes. However, American popular literature had been populated by characters with secret identities long before the first superhero comics appeared. The crime-fighting dual-identity vigilantes enjoyed their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s, during the golden era of pulps. Selling usually for 10 cents, pulp magazines were the best source of cheap thrills and heroics. In this era, dozens of costumed avengers appeared and the most popular was undoubtedly The Shadow. Between 1931 and 1949, Street and Smith published more than three hundred stories featuring The Shadow, most of them written by Walter B. Gibson. In the late 1930s, several of the pulp conventions, including costumed avengers, were adopted by the creators of the superhero comic books, and The Shadow served as a main inspiration for Bill Finger’s and Bob Kane’s Batman. The article discusses the evolution of crime-fighting pulp heroes with a particular emphasis on The Shadow as the most influential dual-identity avenger of the era.

Jules Verne and the Media

502 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) provide a convenient overview of the tradition. The book perhaps lacks a comprehensive discussion of the concept of history, and of the multiple competing narratives jostling for hegemony. While some chapters address this topic in specific textual contexts, a more general discussion would have helped. On the whole, however, this collection is a welcome addition to scholarship on alternative histories.—Suparno Banerjee, Texas State University Jules Verne and the Media. Guillaume Pinson and Maxime Prévost, eds. Jules Verne et la culture médiatique [Jules Verne and Media Culture]. Québec, Canada: Presses de l’Université Laval, COLLECTION LITTÉRATURE ET IMAGINAIRE CONTEMPORAIN, 2019. viii+256 pp. CAN$29.95 pbk and ebk. In their introduction to this recent collection of essays on Verne, the editors make the observation that few authors of world literature were as deeply immersed in the media culture of their time as Jules Verne. They may be right. During his writing career Verne leaned heavily on newspapers, popular magazines, and scientific journals both for plot ideas and technical documentation for the 50+ novels of his Voyages Extraordinaires. As he explained during one of his many interviews: I am a great reader, and ... I always read pencil in hand. I always carry a notebook about with me and immediately jot down ... anything that interests me or may appear to be of possible use in my books. To give you an idea of my reading, I come here every day after lunch and immediately set to work to read through fifteen different papers, always the same fifteen, and I can tell you that very little in any of them escapes my attention. When I see anything of interest, down it goes. Then I read the reviews, such as the Revue Bleue, the Revue Rose, the Revue des Deux Mondes, Cosmos, Tissandier’s La Nature, and Flammarion’s L’Astronomie. I also read through the bulletins of the scientific societies, especially those of the Geographical Society.... (R.H. Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home.” McClure’s Magazine 2.2 [Jan. 1894]: 120-21) It is also important to remember that the majority of Verne’s novels first appeared in his publisher Hetzel’s semimonthly periodical, the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation [Magazine of Education and Recreation], before being reprinted as octavo books and translated into many languages. As a lucrative follow-up to his early work in the theater, Verne had a hand in adapting several of his more popular novels to the stage; Around the World in Eighty Days (1874), for example, played to sell-out crowds in over 3000 performances between the late 1870s and 1940 (see Jean-Michel Margot, “Jules Verne, Playwright” SFS 32.1 [2005]: 150-71). The nineteenth-century press is further represented by the many newspaper reporters and journalists who populate Verne’s narratives, including Gédéon Spilett in The Mysterious Island (1870), Alcide Jolivet and Harry Blount in Michael Strogoff (1876), Claudius Bombarnac in the novel of the same name (1892), and Harris Kymbale in The Will of an Eccentric (1899). In the American pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, editors such as Hugo Gernsback popularized the notion of Verne as one of the inventors of “scientifiction” (a drawing of Verne’s tombstone even appeared on the title page of Amazing Stories). And Verne later became 503 BOOKS IN REVIEW universally recognized as “the father of science fiction on screen” (Brian Taves, Hollywood Presents Jules Verne, 2015) with several blockbuster films such as 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1916, 1954), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959, 1999), Master of the World (1961) and Mysterious Island (1961, 2012). Finally, beginning in the late 1980s, Verne’s romans scientifiques and their many spin-offs are credited with having inspired the retrofuturistic neo-Victorian sf subgenre known as steampunk. Much like steampunk—which owes its popularity more to its aesthetic (fashion, art objects, and architectural style) than its print narratives—Verne’s relationship to media culture goes much deeper than his literary production. As Jean-Michel Margot correctly observes, during his lifetime Verne...

A Woman of the Pulps: Leslie F. Stone

Leslie F. Stone (1905–1991) was the second woman (after Clare Winger Harris) to publish science fiction in the early pulp magazines. She became a prolific and popular author of the Gernsback era. This essay offers readers a rare view into the life and experiences of a pioneering woman writer of the pulp era. It explores the origins and motivation behind her pseudonym, the reception Stone experienced as a woman writer in a male-dominated field, her innovative new plots, and her departure from publishing amid the wartime horrors of the 1940s.

Buck Rogers in the 25th century: Transmedia extensions of a pulp hero

AbstractTheBuck Rogers in the 25th century A.D.comic strip first appeared in the newspapers on 7 January 1929, an important moment in the history of comics. It was the first science fiction comic strip, and, along withTarzan– which curiously debuted in comics the same day – the first adventure comic. However, many people are unawere that the origins of Buck Rogers are not rooted in comic strips, but in popular literature. In fact, Anthony Rogers (not yet “Buck”) was the main character of two novellas published in the late 1920 s inAmazing stories, the first pulp magazine:Armageddon 2419 A.D.(August 1928) and its sequel,The airlords of Han(March 1929). At first, the stories in the daily comic strips closely followed those of the novels, but soon the Buck Rogers universe expanded to include the entire solar system and beyond. This expansion of the narrative world is particularly evident in the weekly charts published since 1930. Soon, Nowlan’s creature became a real transmedia character: in the following years Buck appeared in a radio drama series (aired from 1932 until 1947), in a 12-episode 1939 movie serial, as well as in a 1950/51 TV series. Toys, Big Little Books, pop-up books, and commercial gifts related to the character were produced, before the newspaper comic strip ended its run in 1967. In recent years, the character has been reeboted a couple of times, linked to the TV series of the late 1980 s and to a new comic book series starting in 2009. Buck Rogers thus found himself at the centre of a truly character-oriented franchise, showing how transmedia characters can be traced back almost to the origins of the modern cultural industry. The following article focuses on the features that distinguish Buck Rogers as a character and on the changes of his identity across media, presenting a revised version of an analytical model to investigate transmedia characters that has been developed in previous publications.

What Is This Thing? Framing and Unframing the Science-Fiction Film

This essay considers the uncertainties surrounding the advertising of science fiction when it was still a relatively new player among film genres in the 1950s. Because it was sourced in the science-fiction pulp magazines—based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s story "Who Goes There?"—and was the first science-fiction film advertised in the pulps, The Thing from Another World (1951), as well as RKO studio's unconventional ad campaign for it, offers some insight into this uncertainty. While science fiction was starting to powerfully emerge in various media, as evidenced by the new television space operas, comic books, and a growing number of pulp magazine platforms, RKO seemed unsure of how best to frame The Thing. Instead of presenting it in a science-fiction context, RKO mounted a campaign that framed this work, even for the pulp audience, in various non-science-fiction ways: as a horror movie, as an exploitation effort, and even as a mystery or suspense narrative. The approach of this curious campaign, the essay argues, reveals the film industry's indecision about the box-office potential of science fiction, even as the genre was poised to explode in popularity during the decade. That uncertainty underscores the extent to which science fiction has followed what Rick Altman describes as a "process" route in its perception as a genre.

What Is This &lt;em&gt;Thing&lt;/em&gt;? Framing and Unframing the Science-Fiction Film

This essay considers the uncertainties surrounding the advertising of science fiction when it was still a relatively new player among film genres in the 1950s. Because it was sourced in the science-fiction pulp magazines—based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s story "Who Goes There?"—and was the first science-fiction film advertised in the pulps, The Thing from Another World (1951), as well as RKO studio's unconventional ad campaign for it, offers some insight into this uncertainty. While science fiction was starting to powerfully emerge in various media, as evidenced by the new television space operas, comic books, and a growing number of pulp magazine platforms, RKO seemed unsure of how best to frame The Thing. Instead of presenting it in a science-fiction context, RKO mounted a campaign that framed this work, even for the pulp audience, in various non-science-fiction ways: as a horror movie, as an exploitation effort, and even as a mystery or suspense narrative. The approach of this curious campaign, the essay argues, reveals the film industry's indecision about the box-office potential of science fiction, even as the genre was poised to explode in popularity during the decade. That uncertainty underscores the extent to which science fiction has followed what Rick Altman describes as a "process" route in its perception as a genre.

"An Error in Chemistry": The Final Typescript

"An Error in Chemistry":The Final Typescript John N. Duvall (bio) The version of "An Error in Chemistry" we read today in the Vintage International edition of Knight's Gambit is the same one readers of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (EQMM) encountered in the June 1946 issue. In setting the type for the first edition of Knight's Gambit in 1949, Random House simply used tearsheets from EQMM, and every subsequent edition of this collection, featuring Gavin Stevens's detective work, uses the text as copyedited by Frederic Dannay. Along with his cousin Manfred Bennington Lee, Dannay began writing popular detective fiction in 1928 under the pen name Ellery Queen. However, Dannay alone edited EQMM, which was established in 1941. I present here an edition of "An Error in Chemistry," based on the copyedited typescript, that restores, as nearly as possible, Faulkner's final prepublication intentions for this story. Although Dannay was an important advocate for Faulkner's fiction and introduced Yoknapatawpha County to a large postwar audience, the changes he made to "An Error in Chemistry" during copyediting point to why a scholarly edition of Knight's Gambit would sharpen our understanding of a key moment in Faulkner's career (following World War II but before Faulkner wins the Nobel Prize) when his critical reputation had ebbed. The story of Faulkner's connection to EQMM, as well as a fuller textual history of "An Error in Chemistry," form part of the larger narrative of how Faulkner entered the canon of American literature. In the third week of September 1945, Faulkner sent his agent, Harold Ober, a revised 28-page typescript of "An Error in Chemistry" for publication in EQMM. This final typescript of the story, part of the Frederic Dannay Papers at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, [End Page 1] has been largely unknown to Faulkner scholars for the last 73 years.1 The only typescript of "An Error in Chemistry" that has been readily available is the one Faulkner had originally sent to Ober in November 1940, but this version of the story had been rejected by all of Faulkner's preferred higher-paying venues, such as the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. In briefly describing this earlier 22-page typescript, James B. Meriwether notes, "This carbon typescript differs from the published version" (77).2 When Dannay offered to buy "An Error in Chemistry," he asked "if [Faulkner] would clear up an ambiguity in the story" (Blotner 1189). The most substantive addition Faulkner made to the 1940 typescript likely explains why other magazines had rejected the story as originally written. The key plot moment simply did not explain. Faulkner assumed that everyone knew how to make a cold toddy. As a result, Joel Flint's fatal error—putting a spoonful of sugar directly into the whiskey—does not account for Stevens's response. In the revised version of the climax, Faulkner spells it out with 19 additional typed lines of text—one must mix the sugar with water first because sugar will not dissolve in whiskey, knowledge passed down from father to son. The addition clarifies what the error in chemistry actually is so that the reader better understands why Stevens immediately leaps on Flint, the imposter, for his failure to make the toddy as Wes Pritchel surely would have. But this is not the only change Faulkner makes in revising the story. While much of the difference in page length of the two typescripts can be accounted for by the fact that Faulkner uses smaller right-hand margins in the original typescript, he introduces several new paragraph breaks and also divides certain longer sentences into smaller units. At the same time, Faulkner, prior to reaching the major addition noted above, becomes more effusive as he retypes the story, often adding new embedded phrases in his final revision. Despite these differences, around three-fourths of the sentences in the two typescripts (particularly those involving dialogue) are identical. Why did Faulkner, who wrote disparagingly of pulp magazines in Light in August and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, submit his story to a mass-market genre magazine? Family responsibilities and a contract dispute with Warner...

Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women by Patrick B. Sharp

433 BOOKS IN REVIEW which audiences are shown “in graphic detail … the very real impact of inappropriate and reckless consumption” (83). She incorporates helpful film analysis into her readings and does so with verve, as in her elaboration of a scene in which clinical laboratory footage is juxtaposed with traditional film footage: “While [the doctor] watches the ‘clinical version,’ the version the audience sees is a more emotional version, a version shot on handheld camera, a version that bobs and weaves, as if filmed by a person in the crowded casino rather than by a security camera fixed to a wall” (82). The book would benefit from more sustained readings of this nature, during which Schweitzer’s style, at once approachable and insightful, comes through. Overall, Schweitzer’s monograph would work well as a reader for lowerdivision courses in film studies with a focus on disaster films or in intro-level medical humanities courses. Its tendency to gloss over critical scholarship while presenting big (if sometimes trite) ideas, while niggling to readers well versed in the topic, would make for a good primer for students just getting used to the idea that there is something more to zombies and apocalyptic plague movies than meets the eye.—Kari Nixon, Whitworth University The Descent of Woman. Patrick B. Sharp. Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women. Cardiff: U of Wales P, NEW DIMENSIONS IN SCIENCE FICTION, 2018. ii+193pp. £60 hc, ebk. This well-researched and very readable study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist responses to Darwinian evolutionary theory examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism in a wide range of early speculative fiction by women. For Sharp, “Darwinian feminism” was “a formative moment in the long history of women’s SF” (173) and he sets out to trace the outlines of this moment. He opens by situating Margaret Cavendish’s A Blazing World (1666) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) as influential precursor texts that provide model critiques of masculinist science, but his emphasis is on later work, from nineteenthcentury feminist utopias to feminist sf published during the heyday of the pulp magazines. Sharp argues that for Darwinian feminists, “Darwin’s account of sexual selection provided the template for diagnosing the violence of patriarchal institutions that enslaved women” and “also provided an account of the possible mechanisms for their emancipation” (2). He situates Darwin’s work in the context “not only of a colonial grammar of race, but also a Victorian grammar of gender and sexuality” (7), and it is through this complex nexus that he reads women writers’ challenges to “violent Darwinian masculinity” (7), even as they worked within the plot structures and narrative strategies favored by male writers. Sharp outlines five “storytelling tactics” (9) particularly popular in early women’s sf: 1) a revisionary take on sexual selection that gives women the upper hand; 2) a privileging of the domestic sphere to which women have traditionally been confined; 3) a reorganization of the colonial gaze in order to challenge masculine aggression and hierarchy; 4) echoing Mary Shelley, a critique of the dangers of masculinist science; and 5) the representation of women through figures of the Amazon and the angel 434 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) “as the apex of Darwinian feminist evolution” (9-11). Sharp convincingly makes the case that science fiction is “a Darwinian genre” (1) and that evolutionary theory is a key element of sf’s scientific megatext. As part of his analytical framework, Sharp notes how systems of genres become available to writers at specific historical and cultural moments. His first two chapters, “Scientific Masculinity and its Discontents” and “Charles Darwin, Gender and the Colonial Imagination,” provide both a detailed overview of the kinds of scientific “plots” that feminist writers struggled with/against and a very useful outline of Darwin’s work, including its developments and transformations in the socio-philosophical works of Herbert Spencer and others. These opening chapters tracing the rise of the masculinist science project provide an excellent background to Sharp’s study. He pays careful attention to the scientific theories and stories that directly impacted the writing of science fiction in the late...

The Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard's and Quantin's Illustrated Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884): An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Relations Between the Visual and the Verbal

The Portrayal of the Grotesque in Stoddard's and Quantin's Illustrated Editions of Edgar Allan Poe (1884): An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Relations Between the Visual and the Verbal

Building Aerial Empires: technology and geopolitics in American and British juvenalia through the 1930s

In the later 1800s a new form of popular literature, juvenalia, emerged to cater to children as programmes of universal literacy were put in place throughout the industrialised world. This had its greatest impact on the transatlantic English-speaking world. British writers such as G. A. Henty romanticised views of life on the imperial frontier and became massively popular in America. By 1900 American juvenalia was beginning to favour imperial world views, in particular in many of the several thousand titles published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Such juvenalia ‘educated’ teenagers, boys especially, in their responsibilities to their society and persuaded American boys to support imperialism, in particular by focusing on the exciting role of new technologies in militarism. Victorian and Edwardian juvenalia are filled with optimism and such new technologies as airplanes and submersibles were seen as the solution to many geopolitical problems. Such optimism faded with the appalling experiences of World War I. In the 1920s Hollywood movies such as Wings and Hells’s Angels began to romanticise such air combat. In Britain Captain W. E. Johns responded negatively. Johns’ view of the technologies, expressed through the experiences of his main character, Biggles, and based on his own air combat experience in the war, was realistic and well aware of their deadly nature. The Biggles novels also clearly encouraged air policing of the Empire. American pulp magazines and novels continued to romanticise air war but by the early 1930s they had exhausted wartime topics and began to focus on the building Japanese threat. As an American ‘Empire’ developed in the period between World Wars I and II it focused heavily on the Pacific and the growth of American geopolitical interests there. L. Ron Hubbard’s many novels of aerial warfare are about America’s need to support China against Japanese aggression. Both British and American juvenalia culturally conditioned their country’s young males to fight what both authors clearly saw would be the next aerial war.