The Loss of a "Smoking Gun"

I find myself perpetually weary of what I have observed as the all too common trap of the middle-class Marxist critic: a view of the working class that is stifled by pity for the betrayed and debased worker, whose faults are almost entirely a consequence of the system which he inhabits met by a reverence and nostalgia for the noble savage and the dregs of his rural folk-art or genuinely popular urban art.
I was happy to see that Denning escaped this stifling trap.
Denning argues that the history of the dime novel is not merely a history of a culture industry, but a history of their place in working class culture and their distinct role in the struggle to reform that culture. As he convinced me through extensive research, “ workers made up the bulk of the dime novel public,” therefore “their concerns and accents are inscribed in cheap stories” (“concerns and accents” that can be determined through their allegorical inscription and an understanding of the working-class reading practice which involved consumption as well as interpretation). In other words, the 19th century American worker was not a victim of a culture industry rooted in capitalist self-interest and bourgeois hegemony. The dime novel was a “contested terrain, a field of cultural conflict where signs with wide appeal and resonance take on contradictory disguises and are spoken in contrary actions,” a place where the often divergent working-class attitudes found expression.
One of the arguments in Mechanic Accents that seems to reflect Denning’s larger theoretical investment is the explanation of the “fiction question,” “the debates, moral panics, and attempt to regulate production that marked the nineteenth-century reaction to the flood of cheap stories and the marked increase in working-class reading.” The fiction question and consequent reform of the dime novel is not a pure symptom of “the genteel” vs “the sensational” (the middle class vs the lower class). Denning argues that even the labor papers simultaneously critiqued and appropriated “trashy” fiction, indicating ambivalence on the part of working-class leaders regarding the emergence of this mass literary culture in the nineteenth century. In this way, the working and bourgeois classes shared in a fundamental dialogue: the relationship between culture and society.
Does the transformation and critical positioning of the dime novel in the wake of 1890 mark a silencing of the class conflicts of the gilded age? Through what mediums do today’s working class engage in discussions of culture and society?

-( Also, quite literally...)Denning possesses a “smoking gun” in the form of short life histories of 'undistinguished Americans' published in the The Independent that make references to dime fiction reading. Moreover, the autobiographies of immigrants, laborers, and factory workers – littered with insights regarding how the working class understood and interpreted sensational fiction – are explicit testaments to the relationship between culture and historical consciousness. Lucky Denning.