Paula Rabinowitz's American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main PDF

"There is actual wish for a tradition that makes it as effortless to shop for a publication because it does a pack of cigarettes."—a civic chief quoted in a brand new American Library advert (1951)

American Pulp tells the tale of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and the way they introduced modernism to major highway, democratized literature and concepts, spurred social mobility, and helped readers type new identities. Drawing on huge unique study, Paula Rabinowitz finds the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impression of the pulps among the overdue Thirties and early 1960s.

Published in huge numbers of titles, to be had in all places, and infrequently promoting within the thousands, pulps have been throwaway items available to an individual with 1 / 4. Conventionally linked to romance, crime, and technological know-how fiction, the pulps in reality got here in each style and topic. American Pulp tells how those books ingeniously repackaged intellectual fiction and nonfiction for a mass viewers, drawing in readers of each variety with provides of leisure, enlightenment, and titillation. concentrating on very important episodes in pulp heritage, Rabinowitz seems to be on the wide-ranging results of loose paperbacks allotted to international battle II servicemen and ladies; how pulps caused very important censorship and primary modification situations; how a few homosexual girls learn pulp lesbian novels as how-to-dress manuals; the not likely visual appeal in pulp technological know-how fiction of early representations of the Holocaust; how writers and artists appropriated pulp as a literary and visible kind; and lots more and plenty extra. interpreting their often-lurid packaging in addition to their content material, American Pulp is richly illustrated with reproductions of dozens of pulp paperback covers, many in color.

A interesting cultural heritage, American Pulp will swap the way in which we glance at those ephemeral but enduringly fascinating books.

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