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Fifty Shades of Pulp
Book Review
Wald, Alan http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4384
Publisher: Against the Current
Date Written: 01/03/2015
Year Published: 2015
Resource Type: Article
Book review of Paula Rabinowitz's 'American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street.'
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
By “pulp,” Rabinowitz denotes not only the luridly-illustrated crime, science fiction, and risqué sex writing published on the coarse wood-pulp paper that most commonly defines this genre emerging in the early 20th century. She is also talking about inexpensive paperbacks of all varieties, including reprints of classics and non-fiction, some of which have covers duller than Andy Warhol’s eight-hour Empire (1964).
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Rabinowitz is certainly a cultural historian par excellence, but American Pulp is structured as a sequence of gemlike components of a multilayered metanarrative; it is more than a history -- or at least more interesting than just history. It’s cultural studies in the best sense, that of widening the landscape.
Literary archeology is a cornerstone of cultural studies, and Rabinowitz, a specialist in materialist feminist cultural studies at the University of Minnesota, has long been a master of exhuming and reinterpreting texts.
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