The Columbia History of the American Novel

ideological, and commercial developments of the period.

Critics of popular culture in the industrialized era have theorized alternative models of the relationship between popular forms and society, or specifically the effect of the commodification of culture on literary production. At one end of the spectrum, the Frankfurt School condemned the 'culture industry' as a capitalist operation manipulating and deceiving a passive public. That reading of mass culture is one that echoes through many avowedly untheorized attitudes: Ralph Ellison is not unusual in perceiving the debasement of African American culture in its appropriation by mass forms of entertainment. The opposite response is epitomized by some of Leslie Fiedler's work, -285- which celebrates mass literature as the spontaneous expression of modern folk culture. These diverse connotations are represented in the multiple definitions of the term 'popular,' itemized by Raymond Williams in Keywords (1983):

Popular was originally a legal and political term, from popularis, L — belonging to the people…. The transition to the predominant modern meaning of 'widely favoured' or 'well-liked' is interesting in that it contains…a sense of calculation…. Popular culture was not identified by the people but by others, and it still carries two older senses: inferior kinds of work…; and work deliberately setting out to win favour…; as well as the more modern sense of well-liked by many people, with which of course, in many cases, the earlier senses overlap. The sense of popular culture as the culture actually made by people for themselves is different from all these.

In more recent years an intermediate position has developed, one that is compelling in its recognition of both the trivializing and the empowering potential of popular forms, and that acknowledges the manipulations of the mass media while arguing that the needs and desires of the reading public can act as a counterforce in the collective production of meaning. This perspective is partly a response to the perceived disjunction between critics' and audiences' explanations of the stories that popular forms tell. Privileging the critics' readings assumes and perhaps encourages the passivity of 'untrained' readers, implicitly characterizing them as gulls to the ruses of the manifest content of popular works. The theory of 'negotiation' answers this assumption by ascribing agency to the material institutions of production, distribution, and consumption, to the publishers, authors, and readers of mass literature, all of them being understood to invest the text with their own agendas, vocabularies, ideologies. Michael Denning provides one of the most succinct articulations of the dynamic of negotiation when he says of cheap books that

they are best seen as a contested terrain, a field of cultural conflict where signs with wide appeal and resonance take on contradictory disguises and are spoken in contrary accents. Just as the signs of a dominant culture can be articulated in the accents of the people, so the signs of the culture of the working classes can be dispossessed in varieties of ventriloquism.

The later nineteenth-century explosion of American cheap fiction grew out of major innovations in antebellum popular publishing. This chapter sketches in the early period by tracing the rise of story papers, dime novels, and nickel series, all of which flourished in the -286- latter half of the century. It pays attention to the material circumstances of these works' production and consumption, their textual inscriptions, their authors, and their readers, as the collective coordinates of the 'contested terrain' of popular literature. Such grounding facilitates our understanding of how these popular works spoke to their age — as well as how they speak to our age about the imaginative life of the past — and how they offered to authors and readers models of accommodation, qualified resistance, and negotiation.

In the antebellum period key moments facilitated the onset of cheap fiction: the explosion in America's market economy, the huge increase in its population, the spread of literacy, and the rapid advances in transportation, industrialization, and print technology made possible the production and continental distribution of lowpriced literature to a mass audience for the first time. The first entrepreneurs to take advantage of these material conditions were the publishers of story papers: cheap, weekly compilations of serialized melodramas, didactic sketches, and news digests. The composition and contents of story papers were a direct result of marketing calculations. The large folio sheets with their cramped columns of diminutive typeface, the paucity of illustrations, and the very low price -3 cents to 6 cents per issue — were the result of a narrow calculation about how to attract the largest audience as cheaply as possible. Snippets of commentary and international gossip were added to make the story papers look like newspapers, since only newspapers were eligible for the cheapest, third- class postage. The first story papers were Brother Jonathan and New World, both founded by Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold in 1839; the most popular and longlasting were Robert Bonner's New York Ledger (1855-98) and Street and Smith's New York Weekly (1855-89), each claiming at different times to sell 350,000–400,000 copies a week. These titles and others appeared up to the end of the century, but the form was distinctively forged in its early years: as enthusiasm for the dime novel escalated after the Civil War, later story papers could claim only one-half to one-quarter of the earlier versions' circulation; in 1877, Publishers Weekly said of weekly story papers: 'These have not been pushed of late years as they used to be, and their readers perhaps are ready for something new.' -287-

The political climate also had a palpable effect on story papers. The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny provided a nationalistic discourse within which publisher-editors could legitimize merchandising calculations of scale and popularity, translating commercial practices into patriotic principles in the apparatus that surrounded and spoke to the fictional contents. In the years when America was battling with Mexico and Britain in its efforts to expand its Western territories, nationalist sentiment was stirred by iconic story-paper titles such as The Flag of Our Union, The True Flag, The Flag of the Free, Uncle Sam, The Yankee Nation, The Star-Spangled Banner, all accompanied by flamboyant heads of eagles, flags, and cameos of the founding fathers. The democratic ethos was invoked in editorial columns and publicity announcements that accommodated readers to the upheavals of industrializing America, by explaining the technology of storypaper production as a process entirely at the service of the public, making 'a paper that shall please the million.'

Story-paper authors also functioned as icons of emergent nationalism. The first story-paper publishers pirated European material, but once that source ran dry, they stimulated American production, first with cash prizes for published stories, then with fees — anywhere from $100 for a novelette to $1600 for a novel. The need to fill pages, then, turned American writing into a paying profession for the first time. Mining that commercial calculation for all its nationalistic potential, publishers vied to boast about the Americanness of their authors and the size of fees paid to certain stellar names (stressing output and price more than genius of production), again emphasizing that these measures were adopted for the public's delectation.

The array of fictional formulas perpetrated by the story papers included some residual forms unchanged from the European tradition: for example, aristocratic costume romances. The most distinctive narratives, however, adapted inherited patterns of sensational action, multiple plot-lines, and stereotyped figures to American settings and the current political climate. The genre 'mysteries of the city,' for example, adapted by George Lippard and, later, Ned Buntline from Eugène Sue, was marked by the peculiarities of the American city in the 1840s as well as by the displacement of rural dwellers after the Panic of 1837.

Melodramas of two types predominated. Stories of masculine ad-288- venture on the sea, in the wilderness, or in historical and contemporary wars with Britain, Mexico, and Native American tribes justified the nationalist cause in specifically democratic terms. Typically, Charles Averill's The Secret Service Ship; or, The Fall of San Juan D'Ulloa, first published in The Flag of Our Union in 1849, focuses its sensationalized propaganda about the contemporaneous Mexican War on the heroic spy, Midshipman Rogers. In his complicated tangle of plot lines, character disguises, false deaths, and indigestible coincidences, Averill entirely sacrificed the convention of secrecy to the allegorical imperative. Far from camouflaging himself in the dress of his Mexican surroundings, Midshipman Rogers accouters himself as follows:

his right arm rear[ed] proudly aloft to the breezes of the Gulf, a superb dark blue banner, on which was embroidered in bright golden characters, the inscription 'UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE,' surrounded by a circle of thirty glittering stars, such as ever gem the Flag of our Union; while the azure sash which encircled his manly waist…was itself a star-spangled standard, folded into a semblance of a scarf.