|
Part One, Forms and Technologies, provides the reader
with insights into the various structural factors that
made and transformed popular culture in the US The most
consistent issues raised in this section relate to
controversies about print production and copyright, in
particular international copyright. So for example, in
Shurman's chapter "Nineteenth
Century Reprint Libraries," the reader learns about the
political, legal, and economic issues that led to the
development of international copyright law, as well as
the role of the Post Office in regulating (promoting
and/or retarding) the growth of cheap print for the
public. Nelson and Chaser's chapter, "Advertising," and
Law and Morita's "Internationalizing the Popular Print
Marketplace" remind the reader that literary texts do
not appear out of nowhere; we need an understanding of
the capitalist context, and one of those contexts comes
from reading the ads that subsidizes magazine
production. Abel and Richards' chapter on the
interaction of early motion pictures and print culture
demonstrates how popular magazines promoted the
nickelodeons, while films created the earliest cultural
icons of the screen, which the public could follow in
popular magazines. Thus a self-sustaining relationship
between cinema and print, which continues to the
present, was created by the early twentieth century. Given how quickly methodologies and theories for literary research change, books such as this risk becoming obsolete shortly after publication. By eschewing jargon and an over-reliance on literary theory, the essays in this section should endure, as they focus on identifying the various print forms--newspapers, magazines (glossy and pulp), and Dime Novels--as guideposts for researchers, rather than interpretive essays. Frederic Krome, Canadian Journal of History 47.3 (December 2012): 679 |
| Oxford's sixth volume of
The History of Popular Print Culture takes as its
subject matter English language script and imagery
between the American Civil War and the First World War.
It is a valuable contribution to book history that is
diverse in disciplinary backgrounds, theoretical
assumptions, and methodological approaches. Despite the
range of methods inevitable in such an ambitious
history, the Oxford volume maintains a sense of
cohesion, with a materialist theoretical grounding that
concerns itself with inquiries into the processes of
production, the specificity of forms, and the influence
of the popular on readers and reading practices. The
collected essays seek to resituate popular texts within
the wider economic, cultural, and political contexts in
which they were produced and received, and to
reconstitute popular readers as active agents who held a
variety of positions in relation to mass culture. Moving
beyond the mere descriptive histories and single author
or title studies that have been symptomatic of popular
print inquiry in recent years, the essays in this volume
answer larger questions about the operation of power
through the analysis of print "networks and movements"
(13). Georgia Clarkson Smith, American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 23.2 (2013): 188-192 |
| Organized into three
sections, the volume begins with ten chapters on the
"Forms and Technologies of Cultural Production,"
addressing dime novels, story papers, magazines, and the
poetry of advertising, as well as postcard culture,
early motion pictures, and the international networks of
US publishers. The nine "Popular Genres" of part 2
include the print forms associated with labor and
woman's suffrage, as well as juvenile and religious
books, Westerns and science fiction, popular poetry, the
humor "industry," and "sensationalism." In ten chapters,
part 3 explores "Sites of Difference and Power" chiefly
in the form of case studies, such as the print sensation
surrounding Stanley's search for Livingstone. In addition to its twenty-nine chapters and an introduction that seamlessly blends the study of popular forms with the study of print culture, the volume offers a chronology of events; a section of microessays and micro-bibliographies on topics left out of the main volume ("Literacy," "Scrapbooks," "Advice Manuals and Self-Help Books," "Sports and Popular Print Culture," etc.); and an annotated bibliography of related print and digital collections. Like the best chapters, the micro-essays succinctly identify key texts and debates in the field, making Bold's anthology an excellent starting point for numerous inquiries. Tara Penry, Western American Literature 47.4 (2013): 402-404 |