Advertisements for themselves: The 1950s American novel and the production of belief.
Item
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Title
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Advertisements for themselves: The 1950s American novel and the production of belief.
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Identifier
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AAI3159205
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identifier
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3159205
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Creator
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Brier, Evan.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Morris Dickstein
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Literature, Modern
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Abstract
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My dissertation analyzes the ways in which American novels of the 1950s, along with the institutions that produced, marketed, and received those novels, were affected by and responded to the emergence of postwar mass culture. Throughout the decade culture critics lamented mass culture's emergence in essays and symposia, depicting it as a threat to American democracy and/or to the high culture created by the pre-war modernists. But at the very moment this fear was articulated most powerfully, the book business was quietly expanding, capitalizing on both an economic boom and the growth in the population of college-educated Americans, forming a new institutional alliance with educators and Cold Warriors to promote reading as both a cultural and political good.;As I argue, the book trade grew in part by advertising its distance from what was represented as an increasingly crass mass culture; this was one of the primary strategies by which literary institutions "produced belief" in the value of the novel. Paradoxically, the result of this growth was closer ties between the literary world and mass culture institutions. This paradox is embedded in a wide range of 1950s novels: literary fare by Paul Bowles, a science fiction paperback by Ray Bradbury, and critically disrespected bestsellers by Sloan Wilson and Grace Metalious. All feature attacks on mass culture; all of them are also, in concrete, material ways that have yet to be discussed, products of the developing relationship between the book trade and mass culture institutions.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
