The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture Volume Six: US Popular Print Culture 1860-1920

by Bold, Christine

• ISBN13: 9780199234066
• ISBN10: 019923406X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-02-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

What did most people read? Where did they get it? Where did it come from? What were its uses in its readers' lives? How was it produced and distributed? What were its relations to the wider world of print culture? How did it develop over time? These questions are central toThe Oxford Historyof Popular Print Culture, an ambitious nine-volume series devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present. Volume six explores a cornucopia of US popular print materials from 1860 to 1920, the period when mass culture exploded into the everyday lives of large swathes of the population. Thirty specially written essays by scholars from a wide range of disciplines - history of the book; literary, cultural, media, and film studies; social history, journalism, and American Studies - probe the material conditions, proliferating genres, and cultural work of newly affordable and accessible forms. A dozen short entries address additional topics, genres, and approaches. A chronology of the relevant legal, technological, and organizational developments of the period and a list of online and physical archives provide further support for study in this burgeoning field. Cumulatively, the volume revisions the power of 'the popular' in its many meanings - widely circulated, commercialised, vernacular, working-class, cheap, accessible; it recovers and analyses neglected cultural webs and networks, as well as individual authors, famous and forgotten; and it interrogates conventional cultural hierarchies and high/low binaries. The volume pursues some key issues in rich archival and analytical detail. How did new technologies of production and distribution shape a plethora of print forms, including advertising leaflets, postcards, tracts, pamphlets, dime novels, story papers, newspapers, magazines, and cheap books? How did upheavals in the publishing industry and new regulatory mechanisms affect circulation and consumption? How did various genres mediate social and political transformations of the period? How did popular print forms consolidate transnational and borderlands networks? How were particular cultural communities, including Native American, African American, Asian American, and Mexican / America alternately served and oppressed by popular print? How was it seized in support of labour and woman suffrage, and how was it wielded by governmental and educational institutions? How did print interact with other media?

Author Biography

Christine Bold is Professor of English at the University of Guelph. She is the author of three books -Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960 , The WPA Guides: Mapping America , and Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers' Project in Massachusetts - as well as numerous chapters and articles on popular culture and cultural memory. She has also co-authored the award-winning book Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials across Canada by the Cultural Memory Group, a collaboration between academics and social justice workers. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement , and she is currently writing a book titled The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924.

Table of Contents

General Editor's Introduction
Volume Editor's Introduction
I. Forms And Technologies Of Cultural Production
1. The Changing Face of Publishing, Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zbora
2. Story Paper Fiction, Lori Merish
3. Dime Novels, J. Randolph Cox
4. Nineteenth-Century Reprint Libraries: When a Book Was Not a Book, Lydia Cushman Schurman
5. Newspapers, Jean M. Lutes
6. The Magazine Revolution, 1880-1920, Amanda Hinnant and Berkley Hudson
7. American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product, Cary Nelson and Mike Chasar
8. Postcard Culture in America: The Traffic in Traffic, Mark Simpson
9. Early Motion Pictures and Popular Print Culture: A Web of Ephemera, Richard Abel and Amy Rodgers
10. Internationalizing the Popular Print Marketplace, Graham Law and Norimasa Morita
II. Popular Genres
11. Religion and Popular Print Culture, Erin A. Smith
12. Labour and Popular Print Culture, Kathryn J. Oberdeck and Frank Tobias Higbie
13. Juvenile Publications, Deidre Johnson
14. Westerns, Christine Bold
15. Science Fiction, David Seed
16. The Humour Industry, Michael H. Epp
17. Sensationalism, David M. Stewart
18. Popular Poetry in Circulation, Coleman Hutchison and Elizabeth Renker
19. The American Civil War, Will Kaufman
III. Case Studies
20. 'To make something of the Indian': Hampton Institute and the Uses of Popular Print Culture, Susan Scheckel
21. 'To have the benefit of some special machinery': African American Book Publishing and Bookselling, 1900-1920, Alisha R. Knight
22. Mexican / American: The Making of Borderlands Print Culture, Kirsten Silva Gruesz
23. The Yellow Claw: The Optical Unconscious in Anglo-American Political Culture, John Kuo Wei Tchen
24. A Transatlantic Sensation: Stanley's Search for Livingstone and the Anglo-American Press, Matthew Rubery
25. Vision of Pacific Destiny: Imperial Geographies in the Overland Monthly, 1898-1900, Yu-Fang Cho
26. Rough Justice: Crime, Corruption, and Urban Governance, Christopher P. Wilson
27. Jacob Riis and Popularizing the Photography of Class Trauma, Keith Gandal
28. American Suffrage Print Culture, Mary Chapman and Victoria Lamont
29. Understanding Readers of Fiction in American Periodicals, 1880-1914, Charles Johanningsmeier
IV. Appendices
1. Additional topics: Advice Manuals and Self-Help Books, Detective Fiction, Literacy, Performance and Popular Print Culture, Photography and Popular Print Culture, Popular History, Popular Science, Pulp Magazines, Scrapbooks, Sentimentalism, Sports and Popular Print Culture, Workers' Autobiographies
2. Selective Chronology
3. Archival Resources