A Catalog Of Dime Novel Material

With their rakish characters, sensationalist plots, improbable adventures and objectionable language (like swell and golly), dime novels in their heyday were widely considered a threat to the morals of impressionable youth. Roundly criticized by church leaders and educators of the time, these short, quick-moving, pocket-sized publications were also, inevitably, wildly popular with readers of all ages. This work looks at the evolution of the dime novel and at the authors, publishers, illustrators, and subject matter of the genre. Also discussed are related types of children's literature, such as story papers, chapbooks, broadsides, serial books, pulp magazines, comic books and today's paperback books. The author shows how these works reveal much about early American life and thought and how they reflect cultural nationalism through their ideological teachings in personal morality and ethics, humanitarian reform and political thought. Overall, this book is a thoughtful consideration of the dime novel's contribution to the genre of children's literature. Eight appendices provide a wealth of information, offering an annotated bibliography of dime novels and listing series books, story paper periodicals, characters, authors and their pseudonyms, and more. A reference section, index and illustrations are all included.

Provides reprints of the texts of 5 detective dime novels, and lists of all the titles in the series published by the five publishers.

This reference contains the addresses of US institutions, listed by collection and by subject, which presents children's literature holdings listed in various formats. A directory of international collections describing the holdings of 119 institutions in 40 countries is also included.

A one-of-a-kind compendium of popular fiction from a bygone era Dime novels, as fundamentally American as baseball and jazz, were an inexpensive and inexhaustible source of popular entertainment for millions of Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The five novels in this unique anthology are classic examples of the form, which encompassed Westerns, early science fiction, detective and mystery yarns, and Revolutionary War historicals. From the handsome gambler "Dashing Diamond Dick" and the daring inventor in "Over the Andes with Frank Reade, Jr., in His New Air-Ship" to the mythic baseball player in "Frank Merriwell's Finish," here are some of the most valiant heroes and notorious rogues in the pantheon. Read together, these novels are fascinating time capsules from a young nation in love with its larger-than-life characters. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses—theorized as contamination and containment—explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.