Cult Fiction: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory [Hardcover]

Here is an exploration of pulp literature and pulp mentalities: an investigation into the nature and theory of the contemporary mind in art and in life. Here too, the violent, the sensational and the erotic signify different facets of the modern experience played out in the gaudy pages of kitsch literature. Clive Bloom offers the reader a chance to investigate the underworld of literary production and from it find a new set of co-ordinates for questions regarding publishing and reading practices in America and Britain, ideas of genre, problems related to commercial production, concerns regarding high and low culture, the canon and censorship, as well as a discussion of the rhetoric of current critical debate. Concentrating on remembered authors as well as many long disregarded or forgotten, Cult Fiction provides a theory of kitsch art that radically alters our perceptions of literature and literary values whilst providing a panorama of an almost forgotten history: the history of pulp.Acknowledgements - Permissions - PART 1: ET IN ARCADIA EGO - 'Scuse me Mr H'Officer': An Introduction - Throwing Rice at Brad and Janet: Illicit, Delinquent Pleasures - Turning the World Round: The Print Revolution - A River So Deep: Literacy, Language, Reading - Outlaws Against The Law Badge: Readers Reading - Smart Like Us: Culture and Kulcha - Living in Technicolour: The Rules of Pulp - PART 2: ARS GRATIA ARTIS - The Ripper Writing: A Cream of a Nightmare Dream - West is East: Nayland Smith's Sinophobia and Sax Rohmer's Bank Balance - This Revolting Graveyard of the Universe: The Horror Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft - Harry and Marianne: the Never Ending Supernatural Soap - PART 3: REQUIESCAT - Requiem for a Print Culture: Books Like a Movie? - Sticky Like Us: Pulp and the Beat of Contemporary TheoryClive Bloom is Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University, UK. Widely published and Series Editor of Palgrave Macmillan's Crime Files series, he is the author ló&