(The potentially empowering effects of such a communal response have been charted for our contemporary period by Janice Radway's account of women revisioning Harlequin romances.) Even beyond the consciously political environment of the adult world, in young audiences' responses, there is evidence that popular reading involves an active shaping of narrative, an expression of choice. Reflecting on his son's response to 1950s comics, Robert Warshow speculated that the boy's fascination with the publishing house, the staff, and the drafting processes indicated a specific strategy on the part of the juvenile reader:
I think that Paul's desire to put himself directly in touch with the processes by which the comic books are produced may be the expression of a fundamental detachment which helps to protect him from them; the comic books are not a 'universe' to him, but simply objects produced for his entertainment.
One could object that the post — World War II boy was a more sophisticated reader than his turn-of-the- century counterpart; the extensive and ingenious editorial gestures of that era suggest, however, that publishers envisioned their audience as both potentially malleable and ever resistant.
In the dime novels and nickel series of the later nineteenth century, publishers, authors, and readers staked their claims to self-301- empowerment and prominence. Reading these opposing moves — which are both productive of and expressed by the formulaic narratives — as 'negotiation' is not to ignore the dangers of social control. After all, the culture industry ultimately circumscribed authors and readers by implicating them in the mass production process. Nor is the intent to represent these melodramas as seriously argued discourses on the political situation. However, fantasizing, as much as reading and writing, is a socially constructed activity with ideological implications; and collective fantasies accent the meanings of popular literature quite as much as individual authorial gestures do.
Some of that delicate balance may have been lost, at least at the textual level, in the imitators of dime novels spawned later in the twentieth century. Partly because of the postal restrictions on series of complete novels, pulp magazines took over from dime novels after World War I, bringing with them a new format and different editorial methods. These weekly and monthly magazines were miscellanies of short and long fiction with various features like quizzes, letters pages, and factual articles, printed on cheap pulp paper and selling for 10 cents or 15 cents. Pulps were invented in 1896, but they reached the height of their popularity only once they began to specialize after 1919: Street and Smith were first with this innovation, with their all-Western
By and large, pulp magazines offered the same formulaic narratives as the dime and nickel novels, dispensing with the juvenile emphasis and adding some violence and sex to the action. Perhaps because these formulas were so entrenched, pulp editors did not direct their authors very closely. Instead, they switched their most intense surveillance to the audience, trying to gauge and manipulate audience response through letters pages and editorial columns. Readers' contributions became formularized in departments — such as the
By design, I have concentrated on the distinctive forms of popular production from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, in an effort to understand the central machinery driving the cheap fiction of the age. Complicating the narrative, however, are best-sellers that were not produced within mechanisms described above, yet clearly signaled significant ideologies. Running parallel to story-paper and dime-novel production, for example, were the monthly middleclass, middlebrow magazines aimed at a female audience. Periodicals such as Godey's
Also significant among periodicals was the fiction serialized and reviewed in
Finally, another category of novels proved popular by consumption, and they appear in the standard bibliographies as 'best-sellers' of the period. Such works are Mark Twain's
Story papers and dime novels were the most visible fictional forms of nineteenth-century America; explicitly conjoining the market economy with literary production, they set an agenda that could not be ignored. In literary historical terms, the cheap publications affected the larger climate of conventions and expectations governing literary production and consumption. Culturally, their mixture of commercial rhetoric, fictionalized history, and democratized sensationalism created stories that could be appropriated and accented by quite opposite groups. By this point, it is clear that Raymond Williams's definition of 'popular' describes not discrete possibilities but the force field of conflicting interest groups, classes, individuals, and discourses activated by and in popular fiction. These stories were spoken by the people, inasmuch as story papers and dime novels fostered a massive new reading public, especially from the working classes, and those readers collectively and individually 'authored' meanings in their -304- own interests. At the same time, some authorial voices attempted to speak to the people, to fashion a direct address that sustained an impression of intimacy and individual relationship within the homogenizing effects of mass production. And the publishers sought to speak for the people. Developing marketing strategies to demarcate their audience by gender and generation, they produced several distinct formats for cheap fiction, each with its own ideology, agenda, and vocabulary. Fastening on historically and politically charged moments, the formulaic narratives and editorial mediations worked to incorporate both audience and authors into the economically driven 'juggernaut' of the culture industry. Understanding both the 'cultural work' and the rhetorical presence of popular literature in America involves reading this contest of resistant, assumed, and dominant voices.
-305-
