Little Orphan Annie Oakley

Michael Denning's argument for the working class expressions of dime novels holds up well as an excellent cultural analysis. He excellently defends the need for analysis of the content of cultural artifacts, pushing cultural historians away from the distance reading that they sometimes fall into. Close reading allows us to understand plot, genre and convention as a sort of technology, a type of media through which cultural forms move, and through which ideologies are reproduced. By close reading these narratives, Denning can extract the tangled web of popular myth in order to show how these technologies have been deployed.

I know this is totally outside of the scope of the book, but I would have loved to see how these narratives have evolved and continue to impact present media tales. Denning writes that evaluating the past "represent the engagement of the present with the past, the construction and appropriation of a period with its generic and aesthetic systems" (207). Many of the stories that Denning references seem to have a great deal of resonance after 1900, such as the figure of Little Orphan Annie, which revived the figure of the honest, hardworking orphan girl who suddenly falls into wealth. Begun in 1924, the story evolved into Broadway productions, television shows and film adaptations. Additionally, I see resonances of the western outlaw in current action heroes and heroines. The detective story continues to be a popular format, reincarnated in the urban police drama, like SVU. It would be interesting to see whether or not these genre adaptations and evolutions carry similar class distinctions as their dime novel predecessors, of if they have been appropriated into capitalist discourse. These technologies continue to be used, but does Little Orphan Annie still carry the politics of working girl narratives? Does Buffy the Vampire Slayer carry the radical anti-establishment implications of Annie Oakley? And what does it mean when these narratives are combined into the pastiche of post-modernity? For example, Scooby-Doo's mystery solving teens don't seem to carry the same weight as Pinkerton detectives.