Search Results

The emergence of the best-seller — a term coined in the 1890s — is closely tied to the growth of a mass reading public. The publishing format for fiction changed from the three-volume standard priced at one-and-a-half guineas to the single volume priced six shillings or less. Surveys of working-class reading habits are also noted. This chapter explores the quantity of sales that qualified a book to be ranked a best-seller, and provides annual best-selling titles for Britain from 1875, and in the U.S.A. from 1895, to 1918. It discusses the relationship of the best-seller to the expanding market for miscellany magazines such as Tit-Bits, and to its forerunner in the Sensation Novel of the 1860s. Several such stories by Miss M. E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Mrs Henry Wood still enjoyed mass appeal and even critical appreciation in the1900s. By contrast, the contemporary best-seller was generally looked down upon, in part because of advertising gimmicks deployed by publishers to beguile readers. Such salesmanship also annoyed other authors whose work they felt was not advertised enough. Writers whose experiences and attitudes are discussed here include Ethel M. Dell, Rider Haggard, Maurice Hewlett, Robert Hichens, Fergus Hume, Keble Howard, W. B. Maxwell, William Le Queux, Annie S. Swann, and Edgar Wallace.

Florence Barclay was in a different category of best-seller, her work being suffused by her strong Evangelical religious feeling. She was the daughter of one Anglican clergyman and wife to another. Music was an additional source of inspiration. How aware she was of the equally strong note of sexual passion running through her stories is a moot point, although she was clear that romantic as well as Christian love was the basis of the perfect marriage, as she believed was personified by the Brownings, whom she idolised. Strikingly, her heroines were much older and plainer than their male lovers; character, which included sporting prowess — an accomplishment they shared with Barclay herself — mattered above physical beauty. Though her detractors derided her apparent naivety and social conformity, in fact she was politically a Liberal and in many respects an assertive and independent-minded woman. Like Garvice, Barclay had her first work published in three-volume format and it failed to take off. Success came to her decades later, in part because of keen marketing by Putnam's in Britain and in the U.S.A., where her novel The Rosary topped the best-seller list in 1910, and where her sister had become a well-known evangelist. Barclay, while enjoying her stature as a Queen of Romance, held back from fully exploiting her celebrity.

Marie Corelli was Hall Caine's jealous rival as best-seller for several decades. Like him, she had an extraordinarily high opinion of herself and believed she had created a literature to last along with Shakespeare, whom she idolised. Because of Shakespeare she chose to reside in Stratford-on-Avon where she equally attracted worshippers and sight-seers. Corelli's overwrought style and unbounded imagination drew countless readers as well as critical derision: she maintained a long-running feud against reviewers whom she felt envied her genius. She affected to despise publicity while courting it. Her novels involved the summoning up of fantasy worlds of pseudo- science combined with spiritualism. They were also replete with denunciations of what she considered contemporary vices: the hypocrisies of aristocratic society, toadying to royalty, women marrying for money and title, New Women, the sexual double standard, gossip, secular education, corrupt critics, and so forth. She herself held many of the ugly prejudices of her day, including anti-Semitism. A popular lecturer, she was an outspoken anti-suffragist while at the same time a notably independent woman.

Hall Caine is an extraordinary case study in the best-seller genre, not simply because of his boast of having made more money by his pen than any previous author, but because he believed he had created lasting literature on an epic scale like Tolstoy. He also adapted his stories for the stage, which yielded greater profits even than his book royalties, and he was excited by the emerging film industry. His unabashed self-promotion earned him scorn from Punch and from most other writers; but George Bernard Shaw defended him both because he considered Caine's career benefitted the writing profession generally and because they held overlapping views on radical politics and on the censorship of books and plays. Caine freely confessed to using Bible stories as the source for his own, although his personal religion was unorthodox and he was a more formulaic writer than he cared to admit. Outwardly, an enviable success, rich and with a knighthood, Caine was depressed by his inability to fulfil his principal ambition, to write a classic Life of Christ; his family life too was shadowed by dark secrets, including illegitimacy.

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which women’s rural fiction was heavily implicated in conversations about the encroachment of middlebrow culture, and discusses the remarkable popularity of best-selling rural fiction by women. It analyzes the economy of literary prizes and the prominent placement of these novels within that economy, and attempts to unpack the presumed relations among women, sentimentality, and rurality. It also reads closely several best-sellers—by Edna Ferber, Martha Ostenso, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Gladys Hasty Carroll—both for what they demonstrate about the relations among women, rurality, and the bookselling industry, and to refute the assertion that women’s farm novels of the period were trite, or that they evaded engagement with the pressing concerns of modernity.

Conventional literary histories ignore the extent to which sport has been a source of human drama quite as much as love, politics, war, religion, crime, and adventure. This chapter redresses that omission by detailing the wide range of authors' participation in and passion for sport in this period. Above all, Nat Gould was the best-seller of stories about horse-racing. He usually included some romantic interest and criminal activity, but what gave his work its distinction was the thrilling descriptions of horse races. He was immensely productive, writing 130 books at the rate of about five a year. His total sales, some 24 millions by the mid-1920s, probably exceed those of any contemporary writer; but because of the format in which he published — the cheap ‘yellowback’ or paperback — his remuneration was less than that of Hall Caine or Marie Corelli. The chapter also brings out Gould's egalitarian yet conservative social philosophy, along with the importance of the time he spent in Australia being recognised.

Chapter 5 argues that anxieties about culturelessness and the disappearance of authentic places during the Neo-Gilded Age beginning in the 1980s spurred the resurgence of literary regionalism at a time when the market expansion of the trade paperback novel opened up a new venue for regional writing. Customer reviews posted to the Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites regarding four best sellers—Jan Karon's At Home in Mitford (1994), Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (1997), Adriana Trigiani's Big Stone Gap (2000), and Silas House's Clay's Quilt (2001)—reveal that they evoked for white readers ideals of home, hometown, home place, and ancestral homeland, though readers' precise interpretations depended upon their personal geographic histories and loyalties. Touristic, nostalgic, charmed Appalachian, and affirmed Appalachian readers embraced a notion of the region as protected from the consumer capitalism that permeated their own lives. Many relied upon Appalachian-set bestsellers as a means to participate in the era's search for roots, heritage, and identity. Despite readers' faith in the documentary accuracy of popular novels, the novels do not offer the diversity of stories that might allow them to satisfactorily fulfill their frequently assigned role as “Appalachian Studies 101.”

In Chapter 3, readers' responses to Harriett Simpson Arnow's agrarian Hunter's Horn (1949) and her migration-themed The Dollmaker (1954) illustrate white American concerns about mobility and “roots” that stemmed from the Southern Diaspora, rural-to-urban migration, and the mass suburbanization of the mid-twentieth century. Despite Arnow's reputation as the most authentic of the authors in the study, fan mail indicates that her novels became best sellers in part because they met the same readerly needs that popular regionalism historically met: the production of authentic place, the construction of imagined community, and the augmentation of power. Post-WWII-era readers interpreted Arnow's best sellers as narrating the possibility of an inward-looking, rural, and rooted community of belonging. Almost all of Arnow's readers—including cosmopolitan elites, midwestern professionals, and migrants—regretted “the disappearing closeness to the soil, the uprootedness of human beings” and inadvertently endorsed a kind of white nationalism that viewed a pastoral Appalachia as both home and as national homeland. Arnow's success anticipates the popularity of Appalachian-set fiction among outmigrants and their descendents into the twenty-first century.

This chapter evaluates Jean Sasson's Mayada. Critics rarely look at best-selling life narratives, although of course many readers do. The connections of life story and book markets to geopolitics are scarcely veiled at all. The fate of Norma Khouri's hoax life narrative Honor Lost, a generic sibling of Mayada and a contemporaneous publication, is a reminder of how important this assertion by a genuine native subject must be. The narrative structure of Mayada is a complex series of life narratives that circle around the oppression of women in Iraq. It presents some hope for a smooth transition to a Western style democracy in Iraq. Both Sasson and Mayada al-Askari respond to criticisms of Mayada and use the Amazon.com website to reinforce their intention that “this book makes readers admire and respect Arab women.” It is noted that the veiled best-seller is clearly a potent weapon in propaganda wars now.

Chapter 2 contributes to our understanding of the Progressive Era by illuminating the anxieties of a swath of middle-class Americans whose pursuit of schooling and professional work compelled their social and geographical movement away from the people and places of their childhood. Appalachian studies scholars have pointed out that Kentuckian John Fox Jr.'s fiction inspired feuding hillbilly caricatures that in turn justified industrial exploitation and affirmed national readers' nationalism, racism, and imperialism. On the other hand, boosters hoping to increase the prominence of Kentucky and Virginia have venerated Fox's supposedly sympathetic portrayals of mountaineers. A reader-centered approach confirms that Fox's best-selling The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) offended locals and served the needs of nationally-identified readers. But archived letters also uncover the presence of a set of transitional readers caught between the local and the national due to their geographic and upward mobility. Fox's fan mail suggests that regional fiction served to articulate and foster a sense of homesickness felt by white readers who imagined themselves as having moved up and out of distinctive, familial, vibrant, and backward home places and signals the emergent role of regional fiction in generating regional identity.

Chapter 4 demonstrates the ways that best-selling Appalachian-set fiction in the Vietnam era produced the region as authentic, promoted regional identity, and trained high middlebrow readers to recognize Appalachia's denizens as stand-ins for racial Others who call forth touristic, missionary, or imperialist responses. Both best sellers mentioned in this chapter imagine Appalachia as both a romantic and nightmarish departure from the normative. Readers of Catherine Marshall's pastoral Christy (1967) found affirmation for their missionary outlooks and felt compelled to vacation in the novel's East Tennessee setting. James Dickey's Deliverance (1970) attracted fans among southern and academic highbrow readers, outdoor enthusiasts, and readers desiring a raw and pristine land peopled by white Americans uncorrupted by mass society. Surprisingly, fan mail indicates that the seemingly stereotypical representations of regional people found in both novels helped generate and maintain regional identity among certain readers. Descendents of out-migrants from Appalachia were drawn to Christy as evidence of their humble but colorful heritage, while homesick out-migrants from the broader South managed to find in Dickey's depraved hillbillies a comforting glimpse of home.

This chapter completes the history of Schuon’s Maryamiyya (formerly the Alawiyya), covering events from the 1970s to Schuon’s death in 1998. It considers the spread of the Maryamiyya, its involvement with two best-selling writers (one a Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, and the other a scholar, Huston Smith), and its influence through the books and other activities of Schuon’s followers. The chapter ends with a discussion of the controversial community around Schuon in Bloomington, Indiana, during the 1990s. This stage of the Maryamiyya’s history is notable for Native American “Indian” influences and for sacred nudity.

This chapter examines Ireland’s reading history and reading habits in the years between 1891 and 1922, focusing on best-sellers and popular fiction, newspapers, priestly homily, and other works. It analyses the impact of the cultural revival and the devotional revolution on book buying in Ireland during the period, citing the sales of Gaelic League and Catholic Truth Society pamphlets. It also considers the sale of books imported from Britain, the expansion of libraries, and the rise of the cultural conservatism associated with the ‘Vigilance’ committees that first appeared in 1911.

This chapter discusses the formal and generic characteristics of contemporary Iranian literature, with a focus on prose fiction. It gives an overview of its main genres and forms, focusing on those that do not have equivalents in western literary fields, or whose dynamics of production are distinct. I focus first on genre fiction (crime stories and romances) and then on politico-religious genres (‘Sacred Defence’ texts and literary texts on religious figures)

Verne’s name is synonymous with scientific progress and the challenges, glories, and disasters it has brought. More than simply an author, Verne is a phenomenon of the scientific age, a reflection of both its advances and its perils. He was probably aware even before his death in 1905 that his stories were an active source of inspiration for the new medium of motion pictures; several adaptations had already appeared in France. After beginning his writing career with farces and musical comedies for the French theater, he adapted a number of his novels into spectacular stage versions. As a result, understanding the author’s legacy has always required going beyond the printed page. In the twentieth century, this truism would expand with the accumulation of impressions gained through many screen versions; for the generation of Baby Boomers and those following, these adaptations have been a defining element in the discovery of the author. They encompass every form, ranging from early movie shorts and serials to feature films, television shows, specials, miniseries and series, animated and live action productions.

Shilts and book editor Michael Denneny make controversial decisions about how to get And the Band Played On properly promoted and reviewed. The New York Post’s screaming headline about “Patient Zero” sets in motion worldwide publicity for the concept that one man, Gaetan Dugas, was responsible for spreading AIDS in North America. Shilts’s review of Dr. William Darrow’s cluster study of gay men in Los Angeles proves faulty, although mainstream journalism quickly goes with the “Patient Zero” concept and Shilts is quickly cast as a national expert on HIV-AIDS. Shilts unveils his “AIDS was allowed to happen” posit. A subsequent review of Shilts’s work is mostly critical, particularly from LGBT sources who fault Shilts for allegedly scapegoating Dugas.

This chapter focuses on William Gardner Smith, an African American writer who did not expect to write protest fiction at all. Like other young African American writers of the period, he resisted the burdensome obligation of following Wright’s blueprint. He struggled to reconcile his commitment to what he saw as universal themes with the raw materials for fiction with which his experiences had provided him. He initially determined that he would follow the model of best sellers such as The Foxes of Harrow and Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door in which blacks were always only secondary characters. Smith viewed his approach as pragmatic and a logical consequence of his orientation toward canonical European and American writers.