true stories...or unsolved mysteries?

Agatha!

i did indeed enjoy Michael Denning's narrative, as an alternative reviewing of the history of dime novels, and the canon that we've built around them. Denning points out that, as primarily working-class literature, dime novels have historically been viewed as interesting novelties, but never worthy of serious study. i found it fascinating that he sees them as part of a resistance to bourgeois literature and ideology, in viewing them as allegorical texts (72-3). in this sense, the dime novel has a lot of power, as Gramsci points out (though referring to serial novels), in representing the views of the silent majority.

i agree with Luke that it would interesting to see how these narratives would continue today–or perhaps instead, to apply Denning's argument to other forms of narrative that modern culture still largely sees as irrelevant: romance novels (just as disregarded now as in the 19th century, apparently), magazines, comic books, YouTube videos, etc. being in cultural studies obviously makes us naturally jump at the chance to declare that these have cultural value, but how many people outside of this program would agree? why not?

another burning question i kept having was, who is writing these dime novels? Denning says "the commercially produced dime novels were a product of a nascent culture industry, not the creation of workers. whom do they speak for? whom do they represent?" (81) maybe i missed this in Denning's text somehow, but one criticism i'd have for him is that he quotes a lot of people talking about the dime novels and what they signify to class identity, but i get no sense of the identity of the authors themselves. perhaps we don't know. but wouldn't that tell us a great deal about the intentions of class identity in dime novels?

this reminds me of one of Kathy's essays which i found for my bibliography on fashion and consumption, "True Lies: True Story Magazine and Working Class Consumption in Postwar America." Kathy notes that in a magazine, True Story, geared towards working-class families and in particular women, readers were asked to submit "true stories" about their lives, but these stories were never published verbatim; rather they were collected and rewritten by the staff at True Story so that they could fairly represent some values of the working class, but could always add their own moral or 'preferred' ending to the story–reinforcing the immorality of spending beyond one's own means, for example. perhaps these dime novels are of the same vein, but it makes the agency of both working-class genres kind of problematic. hmmm...