Product Description: This study of the Native American in the western, romance, detective, horror, and science fiction genres examines how even historically accurate representations distort and bias the Native American figure to fit European-based traditions and modern agendas...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In the 1920s a distinctively American detective fiction emerged from the pages of pulp magazines. The hard-boiled stories published in Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and Clues featured a new kind of hero and soon challenged the popularity of the British mysteries that held readers in thrall on both sides of the Atlantic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

B-movies, crime novels, science fiction- all of these forms of mass media came into their own in the 1950s. Dismissed by critics as dehumanizing to both author and audience, these genres unflinchingly exposed the depths of American life at a time when it was not politically correct to do so. David Cochran details how, at the height of the Cold War, ten writers and filmmakers challenged such social pieties as the superiority of American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone related stories of victims of vast, faceless bureaucratic powers. Jim Thompson's The Grifters portrayed the ravages of capitalism on those at the bottom of the social ladder. Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley featured an amoral con man who infiltrated the privileged class and wreaked havoc once there. All of these artists helped to set the stage for the 1960s counterculture's challenge to the established order. In doing so, they blurred the lines between "high" and "low" art.

Product Description: Newhouse (English, Buffalo State U.) assesses the literary legacy of the Beat writers. He locates the concerns of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs in a deep satisfaction with America as a spiritual wasteland filled with intolerable repression and conformity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In the decades before the Civil War, American society witnessed the emergence of a new form of print culture, as penny papers, mammoth weeklies, giftbooks, fashion magazines, and other ephemeral printed materials brought exuberance and theatricality to public culture and made the practice of reading more controversial...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book by Springer, John Parris (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

 When Edgar Allan Poe set down the tale of the accursed House of Usher in 1839, he also laid the foundation for a literary tradition that has assumed a lasting role in American culture. “The House of Usher” and its literary progeny have not lacked for tenants in the century and a half since: writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King have taken rooms in the haunted houses of American fiction. Dale Bailey traces the haunted house tale from its origins in English gothic fiction to the paperback potboilers of the present, highlighting the unique significance of the house in the domestic, economic, and social ideologies of our nation. The author concludes that the haunted house has become a powerful and profoundly subversive symbol of everything that has gone nightmarishly awry in the American Dream. (view table of contents)

Product Description: With unique access to several large private collections, Dr. Sova has extracted scenes and chapters from each decade's pulp fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s, and comments with wit, erudition, and light on the changing evolution of this heretofore unexamined genre of lesbian literature...read more

Product Description: This book proposes a new view of the democratization of America by recasting democracy as a symbolic theater, historically realized in an untheorized and irrational public utterance that began with the Salem witchcraft crisis of 1692 and extended through the Great Awakening and the antebellum era...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: America’s Sketchbook recaptures the drama of nineteenth-century American cultural life, placing at its center a genre—the literary sketch—more available than the novel, less governable by the critical establishment, and shot through with the tensions and types of local and national culture-making...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis … these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, and Street of the Lost, with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull!" and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: From the heart of the Great Depression to the turbulent 1960s, the mid-century in America was a vibrant literary era. Linda Wagner-Martin's comprehensive study encompasses the "political literature" that flourished in the 1930s, the beat movement of the 1950s, and the multicultural literature of the 1960s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The Great Depression was one of the most traumatic events of recent American history. Although this period has been studied extensively, one rich source of material has remained virtually untouched. In this study Donald W. Whisenhunt has analyzed, and provided context for, the vast collection of poetry and song lyrics in the Hoover and Roosevelt presidential libraries to assess another aspect of American public opinion...read more

Product Description: Inarticulate Longings explores the contradictions of a social agenda for women that promoted both traditional roles and the promises of a growing consumer culture by examining the advertising industry in the early 20th century.

Product Description: This text explores the sources and meanings of tales and figures that have dominated the American imagination: the Horatio Alger story, the western and the figure of the private eye. They emerged in the late 19th century as a response to immigration, expansion of industry and urbanisation...read more

Product Description: Book by Diffley, Kathleen

Lists hundreds of books that have made the famous list, and offers facts about the publishing industry, authors, and the list itself

Product Description: This text takes a close look at the relationship between popular and serious fiction, with some surprising results. There are comparisons, for instance, between Norwegian immigrant and emigrant novels, or novels dealing extensively with mental retardation; examination on how a novel can spin out of formula to become truly serious ("The Great Gatsby"), or not always successfully become serious ("The Sun Also Rises")...read more

Offers profiles of Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Dorothy Fields, Leo Robin, and Johnny Mercer

Product Description: Book by Beacham, Walton

Product Description: This volume celebrates yesterday’s pulp magazines and their heroes and heroines. Readers will acquaint themselves with such famous magazine titles as The Shadow, The Black Mask, Weird Tales, and others as obscure as Scientific Detective Monthly and the sensuous Scarlet Adventuress of dim reputation...read more