Department of English

During the nineteenth century, a genre of the literature arose in Europe and the Americas that would be both widely reviled and wildly popular. Alternately called the dime novel, the yellow-back, railroad literature, the urban mystery, and pulp fiction, among many other monikers, this genre was one of the first examples of mass-produced culture. The inheritor of previous forms of popular culture, such as ballads, broadsides, and freak shows, this literature would in turn influence subsequent genres of popular culture, including westerns, romances, noir, radio plays, soap operas, film, and t.v. While these texts were dismissed as trash and sometimes even suppressed as criminal—because they were full of sex, violence, gender defiance, the crossing of race and class boundaries, and all manner of passing, deceit, and depravity—readers from all walks of life devoured them. In this course we will study the nineteenth-century rise and development of this controversial, unruly, and salacious genre in the United States. We will consider its conditions of production, consumption, and circulation; the histories in which it was embedded; and the ways the texts themselves were allegories of their times. What might we learn from such a decidedly low cultural form about its own times? And how might we read that form today?   We will read such thrilling titles as Malaeska, The Indian Wife of the White Hunter; The Secret Service Ship; The Heroine of Tampico: or, Wildfire the Wanderer; The Mexican Spy: or, the Bride of Buena Vista; Inez, the Beautiful: or, Love on the Rio Grande; Deadwood Dick; Big Foot, the Guide; Dr. Quartz, and Dr. Quartz II!; and, closest to home, The Quaker City, or the Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life.