Free eBooks American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism To Main Street Available To Downloads
"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."—a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951)American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. Drawing on extensive original research, Paula Rabinowitz unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s.Published in vast numbers of titles, available everywhere, and sometimes selling in the millions, pulps were throwaway objects accessible to anyone with a quarter. Conventionally associated with romance, crime, and science fiction, the pulps in fact came in every genre and subject. American Pulp tells how these books ingeniously repackaged highbrow fiction and nonfiction for a mass audience, drawing in readers of every kind with promises of entertainment, enlightenment, and titillation. Focusing on important episodes in pulp history, Rabinowitz looks at the wide-ranging effects of free paperbacks distributed to World War II servicemen and women; how pulps prompted important censorship and First Amendment cases; how some gay women read pulp lesbian novels as how-to-dress manuals; the unlikely appearance in pulp science fiction of early representations of the Holocaust; how writers and artists appropriated pulp as a literary and visual style; and much more. Examining their often-lurid packaging as well as their content, American Pulp is richly illustrated with reproductions of dozens of pulp paperback covers, many in color.A fascinating cultural history, American Pulp will change the way we look at these ephemeral yet enduringly intriguing books.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
File Size: 14905 KB
Print Length: 426 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (October 19, 2014)
Publication Date: October 19, 2014
Sold by: Digital Services LLC
Language: English
ASIN: B00N19FGGU
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #642,674 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store) #19 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Modernism #140 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Movements & Periods > Modernism #353 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Genres & Styles > Comics & Graphic Novels
Ah, the lowly paperback. It has had a powerful impact on American culture. Author Paul Rabinowitz delineates the role it has played since first appearing for sale on American newsstands, drugstores, and coffee shops in the 1930’s. Her book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, examines the often overlooked influence that the cheap, pocket-sized books had on every phase of American culture.The word pulp usually often connotes prurient, escapist literature featuring unsavory characters who live outside the moral norms ostensibly espoused by the rest of society. Rabinowitz broadens the definition, however. For her, pulp defines the character of the medium; shoddily bound coarse paper volumes that degrade quickly.According to Rabinowitz, pulp has influenced every facet of American culture from civil rights to the feminist revolution. It set the stage for the sexual revolution of the mid-twentieth century. The paperback, more than any other medium, carried Modernist thinking, or Modernism, into cities and villages across the country. As the author writes:"This is a story of paper, or rather of paperback books, produced in massive numbers between the late 1930s and the early 1950s These throwaway items hold within their covers a rich history of literary tastes; the point to, even reflect, a democratizing literacy and the new forms of identity and community that emerged in mid-twentieth-century America.Curiously, the above passage is very good example of the author’s rambling, verbose writing style. If, for example, the story is about paperbacks, it follows that it would also be about paper. If the period of time for the study is from 1930 to 1950, readers know it is the mid-twentieth-century.
American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street Pure Pulp: FANTASTIC ADVENTURES VOL. 1: TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL PULP MAGAZINE ISSUES FROM THE 1939 & 1940 - 250 PAGES OF PURE PULP SCIENCE FICTION (PURE PULP - COMPLETE ORIGINAL MAGAZINES) Pure Pulp: TRUE DETECTIVE MYSTERIES VOL. 1: TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL PULP MAGAZINE ISSUES FROM THE 1926 & 1930 - OVER 240 PAGES OF STORIES OF DETECTIVE MYSTERIES ... (PURE PULP - COMPLETE ORIGINAL MAGAZINES) Pure Pulp: WEIRD TALES 1: TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL PULP MAGAZINES FROM THE 1930s (PURE PULP - COMPLETE ORIGINAL MAGAZINES) Pure Pulp: WEIRD TALES 2: TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL PULP MAGAZINES FROM THE 1930s - OVER 260 PAGES Pure Pulp: RAILROAD STORIES VOL. 1: TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL ISSUES FROM THE 1935 & 1936 - OVER 300 PAGES OF STORIES OF THE IRON PIKE (PURE PULP - COMPLETE ORIGINAL MAGAZINES) The SHADOW: Vintage Pulp Magazine Covers: OVER 185 Classic Pulp Magazine Covers FromThe 1930s & 1940s Pure Pulp: THE SHADOW And BLACK MASK - 2 COMPLETE CLASSIC PULP MAGAZINES FROM THE 1930s AND 1940s: OVER 230 PAGES OF MYSTERY, MURDER AND INTRIGUE Pure Pulp: WEIRD TALES 3: TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL PULP MAGAZINES FROM THE 1920s & 1930s - OVER 260 PAGES She Tried to Be Good: Sirens and Vamps from the Pulp Classics (Pulp Postcard series) Understanding Bergson, Understanding Modernism (Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism) Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies) Postcards from Route 66: The Ultimate Collection from America's Main Street Main Street Windows: A Complete Guide to Disney's Whimsical Tributes When a Child Is Born, So Is a Grandmother (Main Street Editions Gift Books) Elmo Visits the Dentist (Sesame Street Series) (Sesame Street (Dalmatian Press)) Chai Street - Indian Street Food Recipes for Vegans and Vegetarians (Curry Dinner Recipes Book 3) Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street (The Nineteenth Century Series) Berkley Street (Berkley Street Series Book 1) Street's Cruising Guide to the Eastern Caribbean: Martinique to Trinidad (Street's Cruising Guide) (v. 3)
