Literature, Popular

Literature, Popular. Although Native American and African‐American cultures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had rich and varied traditions of oral narrative, the first popular printed literature in what is now the United States came from colonial New England. As David D. Hall argues in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989), learning to read and absorbing one's religious faith were indistinguishable for the New England Puritans. Thus, this period's popular literature was religious, its literary formulas borrowed from the era's best‐seller, the Bible. The Puritans read published sermons; spiritual biographies and autobiographies that dramatized the struggles of ordinary men and women with doubt and sin; and Indian captivity narratives like those of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams that detailed how their sufferings had tested and strengthened their religious faith. All of these literatures were designed to show the hand of God at work in the world. This “respectable” popular literature existed alongside less reputable works—chapbooks featuring romances, plays, ballads, crime stories, and other fictional materials whose lack of “truth” made them anathema to the clerical elite.

The novel became important in the early republic, although as “fiction” it remained a morally suspect genre. As Cathy Davidson argues in Revolution and the Word (1986), the novel during this period was a profoundly democratic form. Novels were written in simple language, they did not require a minister or other cultural authority to guide one's interpretation, and they featured poor or poorly educated protagonists whose pursuit of literacy and education could serve as a model for the reader's own. Novels of the early republic implicitly welcomed women, the poor, and others excluded from political life by the framers of the Constitution to become citizens of a more democratic republic of letters. Moreover, these novels took the concerns of young women seriously. Both Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) addressed decisions regarding marriage—decisions of great importance in an era when a married woman's property and political rights were subsumed under her husband's.

By the 1850s, rising levels of literacy and education, combined with improved transportation networks, created a national market for popular books and magazines. The first best‐seller, Susanna Warner's Wide, Wide World (1850), was followed by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854), Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall (1855), and Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859), most of which were first serialized in magazines. Later called “sentimental fiction,” these texts were written by women, for women, and largely dealt with the domestic issues that made up women's “separate sphere” in the nineteenth century. Espousing Christian values, these books were intended to supplement the widely circulated religious tracts and Sunday school literature. This literature had what Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs (1985) has called “designs” on the world: a desire to address pressing issues, to educate readers, and to change their hearts and minds so they would, in turn, act to change the social order. Although scholars disagree over the ideologies embraced by this fiction, at least some of it, Tompkins has suggested, involved a radical reimagining of the world, the replacement of patriarchal, capitalist values with matriarchal, Christian ones.

Slave narratives by authors like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano, and Mary Prince circulated widely in the antebellum North from the late eighteenth century onward. Linking literacy and freedom, testifying to the evils of slavery, and serving as a kind of collective autobiography, these narratives linked antislavery speeches and other oral traditions with the world of print. Because these narratives often targeted white, middle‐class women who made up the largest class of readers in the nineteenth century, they drew upon the conventions of popular sentimental fiction to find common ground between black and white women as mothers.

Between 1840 and 1890, publishers like Street and Smith, Beadle and Adams, Frank Tousey, and others began printing and distributing inexpensive fiction variously called dime novels, story papers, or cheap libraries. In Mechanic Accents (1987), Michael Denning identified the targeted readers of this fiction as workers, often of Irish or German descent, who labored in cities and mill towns of the North and West. Although Horatio Alger's rags‐to‐respectability tales are the best known of these narratives, these sensational stories also explored the mysteries of the city, the drama of the great strike, and romance between honest workmen and virtuous mill girls. The popularity of these texts incited controversies about the relationship between “legitimate” literature sanctioned by cultural authorities and the fiction read by a largely immigrant working class. Ought dime novels be allowed to pollute the public libraries? Did sensation fiction corrupt the morals of youth? Was this fiction even worth the (cheap) paper it was printed on?

The controversies continued in the twentieth century as changes in postal rates forced most of the dime‐novel publishers to repackage their cheap fiction as pulp magazines, named for the inexpensive pulp paper on which they were printed. Distinguished from respectable “slick‐paper” periodicals like the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal, pulp magazines flooded the newsstands between 1896 and 1953, offering readers Westerns, romances, detective fiction, sports stories, war stories, and tales of the supernatural. In 1939, Pocket Books originated yet another form for popular literature, the paperback book. Selling for twenty‐five cents rather than the two dollars or more that “trade” hardcover books cost, this innovation enabled people who could not afford trade books to build personal libraries of popular texts.

Throughout the history of popular literature, the same critical debates have been enacted. While some critics viewed these mass‐produced texts as simply a means by which those in control of cultural production manipulated the masses, others saw these narratives as expressions of the authentic dreams and desires of ordinary readers. The critical consensus at the end of the twentieth century viewed these narratives as contested terrain—multivocal texts alternately claimed, rejected, and appropriated in a struggle over social meanings between the class that produces cultural texts and the classes of people who consume them.

Increasingly, scholars have redefined “popular” to refer not to a distinct body of texts but to a way of using texts, of creatively interpreting them in light of one's own concerns. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) calls such reading “poaching” and argues that it makes readers into active producers of meaning rather than passive consumers of mass‐produced texts. This focus on popular appropriations of cultural texts raises questions about the social construction of the category of “popular” across time. As Lawrence Levine argues in Highbrow, Lowbrow (1988), Shakespeare in nineteenth‐century America was popular culture—widely performed, widely known, and widely parodied in a variety of venues—although in the twentieth century Shakespeare came to be sacralized as “high art.” The study of popular literature, then, has moved beyond a literary analysis of widely read texts to include studies of the publishing and educational institutions that shaped their production and reception studies of the way individual readers and communities of readers have taken them up.
See also Capitalism; Censorship; Feminism; Folklore; Journalism; Literary Criticism; Literature; Printing and Publishing; Puritanism; Religion; Social Class; Working‐Class Life and Culture.

Bibliography

John G. Cawelti , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 1976.
Nina Baym , Woman's Fiction, 1978, 2nd. ed., 1993.
Mary Kelley , Private Woman, Public Stage, 1984.
Janice Radway , Reading the Romance, 1984, 2d ed., 1991.
David Reynolds , Beneath the American Renaissance, 1988.
Susan Coultrap‐McQuin , Doing Literary Business, 1990.
Glenwood Irons, ed., Gender, Language, and Myth, 1992.
Jane Tompkins , West of Everything, 1992.
Marcus Klein , Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes, 1994.

Erin A. Smith