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基本説明
This is the first book to consider - and reconsider - a variety of influential and under-examined popular works in American cultural history.
Full Description
What is it about certain books that makes them bestsellers? Why do some of these books remain popular for centuries, and others fade gently into obscurity? And why is it that when scholars do turn their attention to bestsellers, they seem only to be interested in the same handful of blockbusters, when so many books that were once immensely popular remain under-examined?
Addressing those and other equally pressing questions about popular literature, Must Read is the first scholarly collection to offer both a survey of the evolution of American bestsellers as well as critical readings of some of the key texts that have shaped the American imagination since the nation's founding.
Focusing on a mix of enduring and forgotten bestsellers, the essays in this collection consider 18th and 19th century works, like Charlotte Temple or Ben-Hur, that were once considered epochal but are now virtually ignored; 20th century favorites such as The Sheik and Peyton Place; and 21st century blockbusters including the novels of Nicholas Sparks, The Kite Runner, and The Da Vinci Code.
Contents
1. Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers
Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith
2. Missing Numbers: The Partial History of the Bestseller
Sarah Garland
3. The History of Charlotte Temple (1791) as an American Bestseller
Gideon Mailer
4. 'Like Beads Strung Together': E.D.E.N. Southworth and the Aesthetics of Popular Serial Fiction
Rachel Ihara
5. Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854) and the Visual Culture of Temperance
William Gleason
6. 'The Man Without a Country' (1863): Treason, Expansionism, and the History of a 'Bestselling' Short Story
Hsuan Hsu
7. Exhilaration and Enlightenment in the Biblical Bestseller: Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ (1880)
James Russell
8. 'Absolutely Punk': Queer Economies of Desire in Tarzan of the Apes (1912)
J. Michelle Coghlan
9. Ornamentalism: Desire, Disavowal and Displacement in E.M. Hull's The Sheik (1919)
Sarah Garland
10. Small Change? Emily Post's Etiquette (1922-2011)
Grace Lees-Maffei
11. Blockbuster Feminism: Peyton Place (1956) and the Uses of Scandal
Ardis Cameron
12. Crimes and Bestsellers: Mario Puzo Path to The Godfather (1969)
Evan Brier
12. Master of Sentiment: The Romances of Nicholas Sparks
Sarah Churchwell
13.The Kite Runner Transnational Allegory: Anatomy of an Afghan-American Bestseller
Georgiana Banita
14. The Fiction of History: The Da Vinci Code (2003) and the Virtual Public Sphere
Stephen Mexal
Contributor Biographies
Index
