Cult Fiction pp 132-155 | Cite as

Living in Technicolor: The Rules of Pulp

  • Clive Bloom
Chapter

Abstract

Can there be an aesthetic of pulp? For those who would defend high culture the notion of an aesthetic of pulp would simply be a misuse of the term; for those who would defend low culture there would be an avoidance of the question as not relevant. Caught between antagonism and embarrassed approval it remains to create an aesthetic of pulp which acknowledges both social force and artistic taste. We have descended through highbrow culture to middlebrow culture but pulp is a rejection of both, a messy, sprawling, indefinite phenomenon with a vitality that is both exciting and terrifying.

Keywords

Comic Book Star Trek Pulp Material Urban Legend Book Artist 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Stan Lee quoted in Greg C. McCue with Clive Bloom, Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context (London: Pluto, 1993) p. 84. Brendan Behan recalled in 1958 how borstal boys, lacking books, would tell stories called ‘pictures’ after their love of cinema.Google Scholar
  2. See Neil Philip ed., The Penguin Book of English Folktales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) p. xxx.Google Scholar
  3. 2.
    See, for examples, Anthony Delves, ‘Popular Recreation & Social Conflict in Derby 1800–1850’, in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, eds, Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914 (Brighton: Harvester, 1981) chapter 4.Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    Cyril Pearl points out the restrictions put upon upper-class street activity during the late Victorian period. See Cyril Pearl, The Girl with the Swansdown Seat: An Informal Report on Some Aspects of Mid Victorian Morality (London: Robin Clark [1955], 1980).Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    John G. Cavelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976) p. 6.Google Scholar
  6. 5.
    Walter Nash, Language in Popular Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 8.Google Scholar
  7. 6.
    Vance Packard The Hidden Persuaders (Harmondsworth: Penguin [1957], 1960) p. 23.Google Scholar
  8. 9.
    Ron Goulart, Over 50 Years of American Comic Books (Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 1991) p. 195.Google Scholar
  9. 15.
    Steve Holland, The Mushroom Jungle: A History of Postwar Paperback Publishing (Dilton Marsh, Wilts.: Zeon, 1993) p. 136.Google Scholar
  10. 16.
    Raymond Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin [1957], 1990) pp. 258–9.Google Scholar
  11. 25.
    M. Montgomery Hyde, ed., The Lady Chatterley’s Lover Trial (London: Bodley Head, 1990) pp. 4–5.Google Scholar
  12. 26.
    Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981) p. 43.Google Scholar
  13. 28.
    Henry James quoted in Sandor Gilman, The Jew’s Body (London: Routledge, 1991) p. 31.Google Scholar
  14. 31.
    For a more fully developed argument see Clive Bloom ed., Literature and Culture in Modern Britain (Harlow: Longman, 1992) pp. 14–27.Google Scholar
  15. 32.
    See Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker — Urban Legends and their Meanings (London: Picador, 1981). The religious versions of the Vanishing Hitchhiker confirm rather than deny modern, urban semi-secular fears and superstitious attitudes behind much contemporary life. Equally the Mormon version of this tale confirms its relationship to modern religiousity (i.e. Mormonism) both capitalist and urban, rather than some left over from pre-urban, rural or medieval history.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Clive Bloom 1996

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  • Clive Bloom

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