‘republic of letters.’ ” I am not sure what events he is referring to, and I hope he will elaborate, but “pulp magazines and dime novels” go even even farther back, and the dichotomy between them and the Republic of Letters has never been quite as neat and tidy-looking as Sypeck suggests. Among the earliest uses of the term popular culture is an anonymous Contemporary Review editorial, reprinted under that title in the New York Times, bemoaning its lack. The “addiction to low and vitiating forms of reading remains as the most widely operating cause of the virtual non-existence of a popular culture,” the editorial said. The distinction between low and high was not an economic distinction. “Our marvelously cheap literature includes a wide range of high-class reading,” the editorial said. What is more, a generation before the “penny” literature was better:True, even then penny dreadfuls were not unknown, but every week did not bring forth its new one. This content was written with Essay Freelance Writers.
Nor did they appeal so directly to boys as do the existing race of dreadfuls. “The Boy Highwayman,” “The Boy Brigand,” “The Boy Pirate,” “The Boy King of the Outlaws,” &c., are modern inventions. The long drawn out “Mysteries of London” and “Mysteries of the Court,” the leading dreadfuls of the last generation, were happily not meat for babes. Then, as now, also penny serials—which should not be confounded with the penny dreadfuls—were a popular form of reading. But they were very much fewer in number and decidedly better in quality than those of the present day. Their to-be-continued-in-our-next stories were more robust, and their miscellaneous contents less trashy and frivolous. The distinction, for lack of a better word, was literary. “High class” means high quality. I might quarrel with the value-terms robust and frivolous. But they were advanced in order to distinguish good “dime” literature from bad “dime” literature.
The retail price of the literature was a different category of value altogether. The common error is to confuse them. And the source of the problem is the substitution of economic terms—marketing labels, really—for the traditional names of genres. Sypeck says, for example, that these days “genre boundaries are the most porous” they have been since James’s time, but what he really means is that literary markets are fluid. Readers and writers wash between detective fiction and “literary fiction” without caring overmuch what market niche a book belongs to. That’s the bookseller’s headache. The traditional meaning of the term genre has been distorted. Nowadays it is, as I wrote in an essay on Michael Chabon, “not a traditional kind of writing, but a publisher’s or bookseller’s category, grouping together books that attract readers who are looking for similar books. ” The markets for literature have become more porous. Thus Sypeck speaks of “pulp magazines and dime novels” as if these were literary genres, but they are not. That they are not can be demonstrated by the way in which the term pulp was introduced into literary discourse.
In a 1928 essay, the poet and novelist Henry Morton Robinson (who later went on to write The Cardinal, a bestseller of 1950 about a Catholic priest) writes:Wood-pulp literature is bought by the bale and sold by the long ton. It is printed on paper made (apparently) from gray oatmeal, pressed between illustrated covers seven times too vivid to be called garish, and shipped in car-load lots to all points of the English-speaking compass. “For sale at all newsstands,” it is avidly bought up by twenty million readers a week, and read in the best pool-rooms, banking houses, subway trains and University halls in the United States. Wood-pulp literature is the great unrecorded fact of American literature, the successor to the dime-novel as the standard literary diet of a thrill-hungry populace. It is the reading-dividend of a democracy; the weekly fiction light that dare not fail.Robinson goes on to distinguish pulp writing from “the tradition of beautiful letters,” but only in terms of working conditions for authors.
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