Tabloid, Inc

by West, Nancy M.; Pelizzon, V. Penelope

• ISBN13: 9780814292150
• ISBN10: 0814292151
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-22
• Publisher: Ohio State Univ Pr

Summary

Tabloid, Inc.provides the first extended study of the rich exchange between New Yorkrs"s tabloid press and other narrative frames, including Hollywood crime film, museum exhibits, and hard-boiled fiction. Armed with hard-to-find early issues of theNew York Daily News,theNew York Daily Mirror,and theEvening Graphic,V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West trace crime stories from the late 1920s through the 1940s across often-contentious borders between different narrative sites. Rather than dismissing the early tabloids as fodder for "gutter vamps and backyard sheiks," as one critic called them, the authors treat these papers as distinctive literary venues typified by extreme flexibility in storytelling. The papersrs" historically denigrated social status prompts the authors to study what they call "narrative mobility"?the process by which a story, in transiting from one medium, genre, or mode to another, reveals the underlying class boundaries that circumscribe that movement. Combining narrative theory with cultural, literary, and film studies,Tabloid, Inc.marshals a wealth of little-seen archival material that includes not only the pages of the tabloids themselves but also Hollywood press books, studio correspondence, and fabulous though now-forgotten movies.

Author Biography

V. Penelope Pelizzon is associate professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Nancy M. West is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri.