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

Literature, Popular

The field of forensic science initially developed as a scientific application to the legal profession in the nineteenth century. It is probably not a coincidence that the writings of popular fictional literature with regards to detective work also began that same century. E. F. Bleiler, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle were among some of the nineteenth century writers who popularized established law enforcement and early forensic science theories and practices in the detective stories they wrote about. Further detective writings of this literature expanded into the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first century.

In the 1827 book Richmond, Bleiler wrote about circumstantial evidence that links a person to a crime when someone else is in reality the guilty person, as did Dickens in Bleak House. Like other writers in those early years of detective stories, Dickens employed physical evidence to implicate suspected criminals. Poe, who is generally credited with establishing the category of detective fictional literature, wrote numerous books involving fictional crime solution including The Murders in the Rue Morgue, where the crime centers on an unlikely location, and The Purloined Letter, which uses the principle of ratiocination (reasoned train of thought). Poe also introduced the detective C. Auguste Dupin, who is frequently considered the first fictional detective.

British physician and novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in four novels and fifty-six short stories that highlighted the sound deductive reasoning of the investigator. Among Doyle's books are The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hounds of the Baskervilles. Because of the popularity of Doyle's investigative hero, the detective-type story has remained a very popular form of storytelling. In fact, the brilliant detective stories of Doyle are generally considered the beginning point when discussing classic detective books.

Other detective writers who followed Doyle into the twentieth century include G. K. Chesterton (who created a series of detective stories relating the escapades of mild-mannered Father Brown, a Roman Catholic priest turned crime fighter), Arthur Morrison (who invented investigator Martin Hewitt), M. McDonnell Bodkin (who created the first detective family), and R. Austin Freeman (who introduced the first science-based detective, John Thorndyke).

Later on in the twentieth century, other writers weaved tales of detective work including Agatha Christie (who is remembered for her complicated plots and her memorable detectives, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and for such books as Curtain and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ), Dorothy L. Sayers (who created the charming detective Lord Peter Wimsey featured in such books as Whose Body? ), Raymond Chandler (who created the tough detective Philip Marlowe), Erle Stanley Gardner (whose lawyer-detective Perry Mason appeared in over eighty books such as The Case of the Deadly Toy and The Case of the Duplicate Daughter ), Rex Stout (who created the stout detective Nero Wolfe), Dashiell Hammett (who wrote about private eye/detective Sam Spade in such books as The Maltese Falcon ), and the collaborate writers of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee (who wrote under the pseudonym of Ellery Queen while writing about legendary detective Ellery Queen in such detective books as The Roman Hat Mystery ).

A notable writer of 2005 is Kathleen (Kathy) Reichs, who has taken her experiences as a forensic anthropologist and turned it into another career writing best selling novels on real-life aspects of forensic anthropology . As one of only a select number of forensic anthropologists certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, Reichs has traveled worldwide in order to assist critical forensic investigations on such incidents as the United Nations Tribunal on Genocide in Rwanda and the September 11, 2001 disaster in New York City. With her lead character, Temperance Brennan, Reichs has published such popular fictional books based on forensic science as Déjà Dead, Death du Jour, Deadly Decisions, Fatal Voyage, and Grave Secrets.

see also Literature, forensic science in; Television shows.