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This chapter focuses on dime novels and the myths and generalisations associated with them. After providing a background on the beginnings of dime novels and their publishing history, the chapter discusses the seven genres of fiction represented in dime novels: frontier and western stories, mystery and detective stories, love stories, school and sports stories, science fiction and fantasy, comic stories, and sea stories. It then looks at the readers of dime novels before concluding with an analysis of the rise, fall, and legacy of dime novels.

This chapter focuses on American dime novels published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the dime novel as an historically specific but unruly body of popular culture that reflects the social changes, conflicts, and potentials of the period. The chapter tackles this unruliness by discussing the dime novel's genres and content, the conditions of its production, and the practices of reading and interpreting it. It also considers the dime novel's transnational character and how it was influenced by—and asserted its influence upon—sensationalist fiction written in languages such as Yiddish, Spanish, German, and French not only by immigrants to the United States but also by authors throughout Europe and the Americas. Finally, it describes the American dime novel's depictions of race, class, sex, and violence that reflect its nature as a world literature.

This chapter looks at the history of popular westerns across print, performance, and display in the United States between 1860 and 1920. In particular, it examines the dominant western formula that not only popularised the West but also reinforced hierarchies of race and gender while also propagating different myths of American nationhood. It first considers dime and nickel novels, together with Buffalo Bill Cody as a key figure in the western’s emergence as America’s national image and the role of dime novels in that process. It then explores some popular works emerging from the frontier club, including Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian before concluding with an analysis of other figures — well beyond the confines of the frontier club — who made a bid on the literary marketplace.

This chapter focuses on the cheap sensational fiction written by authors such as George Lippard, Ned Buntline, and A. J. H. Duganne for story-papers in the late nineteenth century. More specifically, it examines the role played by Beadle and Company in popularizing cheap sensational literature during the period by publishing dime novels. The chapter cites some examples of dime novels of the period, including Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1844–1845), E. D. E. N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand; or, Capitola the Madcap (1859), Edward Wheeler’s Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills (1877), and Edward Ellis’s Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860). It also considers mass-circulation story-papers such as the Flag of Our Union, the Star Spangled Banner, and Robert Bonner’s New York Ledger.

Chapter Two argues that the frontier club western served as the hinge between open-range ranching and “quality” publishing—industries which were locked in parallel marketplace battles, shared investment and personnel overlaps, and wielded similar tropes of cultural hierarchy. It traces Wister’s journey from Philadelphia to Wyoming to Manhattan via elite clubs which shaped the emerging western. Philadelphia Clubman, novelist and physician Silas Weir Mitchell provided Wister’s entrée to ranching and publishing, and the drawing-room manners and heterosexual romance which the Boone and Crockett Club template lacked. Wyoming cattle kings (especially Cheyenne Club members) cultivated anglophile rituals to mask the brute force of their financial cartel. And Manhattan’s “quality” publishers (including Harper Brothers and Macmillan) developed marketplace manoeuvres—again cloaked as cultural superiority—to defeat competition from dime publishers and reprint libraries. A concluding comparison between frontier club and dime novel westerns suggests how frontier club writings promoted these parallel interests.

This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

This chapter examines the tradition of periodical adventure stories that existed in Britain during the period 1825–1935, focusing on “story papers” and “penny bloods,” also known as “penny dreadfuls.” It first provides a historical background on the emergence of British comics before discussing “story papers” and “penny dreadfuls,” and especially their relationship with similar publications in America and the characters who, in retrospect, can be seen as protosuperheroes and villains. It also shows how these publications established the market and audience for adventure comics in Britain and influenced the rise of a similar market in America, where dime novels and pulp magazines, along with newspaper strips, would later influence the rise of superhero comics. The chapter concludes with an analysis of three of the early treatments of the superhuman from science-fiction literature: Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race (1871), Philip Wylie's The Gladiator (1930), and Olaf Stapledon's Odd John (1935).

This book investigates popular print culture in America between 1860 and 1920. It examines the production of popular print forms and the processes underlying their reception, and how cheap publications released by mainstream and alternative presses shaped — and were shaped by — major events of the era such as the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, mass education and women’s enfranchisement, and violence against ethnic groups and ‘new’ immigrants. The book looks at published materials that were newly accessible and affordable in this period, from books and dime novels to newspapers and magazines, advertising leaflets, tracts and pamphlets, and story papers. It also explores how print pervaded other media such as performance, oral expression, and still and moving pictures. The book consists of three parts: Part I considers the material conditions and qualities of popular print forms, Part II focuses on selected genres (literary modes, patterns, and formulas) that proliferated during the period, and Part III presents case studies that offer insights into historicised moments of popular print culture.

This chapter examines the participation of the working class in various genres and forms of popular print culture in the United States in the period spanning the Civil War and the early twentieth century. More specifically, it considers how labour was represented in commercial media, how these narratives were used by working people, and how the working class produced more direct self-expression in the labour and immigrant press. The chapter first looks at the popularity of story papers and dime novels among working-class readers after the Civil War before turning to the weekly National Police Gazette and its readership. It then discusses the production of print material for religious publications, along with the journalism, activism, and readership of labour and immigrant presses. The chapter also describes the the sites of working-class reading before concluding with an assessment of workers as writers and subjects of popular print culture.