Dime Novel Has a Specific

Dime novel has a specific literary meaning, but has generally become term used to mean several different late 19th and early 20th century popular U.S. fictional stories that were true "dime novels" (costing a dime), story papers, 5- and 10-cent weekly libraries and early pulp magazines. The term was even used as late as the World War II era with a relatively unsuccessful resurgence of the pulp Western Dime Novels. In spirit, though, dime novels are the precursor to contemporary comics, graphic novels, paperbacks, and even popular television and movies based on this genre. The modern usage of the term, however, tends to mean a quickly written, less plot oriented potboiler (true crime, sensational actions, etc.), and is not particularly well regarded in a literary sense (Cullen).

Right around 1860 the term "dime novel" was a brand name. For instance, for fourteen years, Beadle's Dime Novels were a regularly published series of paper-covered booklets, every two weeks or so, for a total of 321. Each was a work of fiction with a sensational and melodramatic plot, and sold for ten cents

(Dime Novels: Beadle's Dime Novels). What become important almost from the start was the manner in which these types of novels played a role in acculturation, information transference, and social and cultural etiquette in the 19th and early 20th centuries: When we look at some of the titles and subjects of this genre we see adventure stories, biographies, serial (soap-opera types), westerns, and novels in which behavior was explained (particularly for young ladies). We will look at a specific Dime Novel for these abstractions, but in general:

Acculturation -- Many readers of the Dime Novels were seeking to escape their lives of work and dreariness. This assumes, of course, that there was enough of a literate population to read the works. However, scholarship also points to the fact that many families gathered together to have at least one member read the latest in the series. They many have been escapist, but they were products of modernity to a number of reasons. They were part of mass production, and therefore tied to industrial technology. Being the first mass produced literature available to the general public, young adults had but two choices many times -- their school primer and the Dime Novel. Newspapers were not written for this level of reading, so the novel eschewed the values the publishers wished to promulgate.

Information Transferences -- Dime novels were filled with nostalgia and mythical stories of the past. Without access to libraries or mass media, often the Dime Novel was the manner in which information was transferred. The upper class received information in a different way, but the Dime Novel provided retelling of historical and current events in a politically correct manner.

Social and Cultural Etiquette -- Many of the messages that were included in the Dime Novel focused around Aesopian-like fables in which right is right and there is a clear distinction between good and bad. Children obeyed, work ethic predominated, romantic love without lust or overt sexuality was the norm, and in many ways, the messages both overt and covert conveyed industrialist capitalistic values (work hard, save, be part of a team, etc.). Thus, the dime novel commoditized culture by focusing on cultural production of wage labor, a capitalist economy, labor process with divides, tends to rationalize, and deskills work (Cox; Denning).

Case Analysis- The Western Dime Novel -- "The Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood To Manhood- The idea of the West was both exciting and invigorating for Americans living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Vast lands were open, and adventure seemed rampant. In fact, so compelling was the idea of the American West that Theodore Roosevelt noted, "More and more as the years go by this Republic will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of its people" (Roosevelt). The frontier was still available through the Dime Novel; adventures with the American Indian, gold mining, vast herds of buffalo, and even the railroad were popular; must like space adventures today. This was the great unknown, and, through a series of essays, historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted that while most of the West was at least mapped, the future of the United States would be decided in the West -- thus, once the frontier became an historical relic, it was fair game to be reconstructed through nostalgia, fable, and fiction disguised as fact for the general public (Wright).

One of the most popular figures of American popular culture was scout and frontiersman William Cody. In 1869, Ned Buntline fictionalized Cody's life which many believe marketed the beginning of the Western as a specific genre in American popular culture. Cody capitalized on this interest when he brought his Wild West Show to the east in 1883. This had a cast of 100 cowboys and Indians, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and a menagerie of wild animals. The circus-like atmosphere brought entertainment and a hunger for more of this genre to the youth of the eastern seaboard well into the 20th century. In essence, Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull (one of the show's guests) invented the Wild West and gave Americans a template from which to build their historical views of the nation and the era (Bridger).