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February 20, 2005
Connect-the-dots authorship
How was pulp fiction produced in Australia from 1939 to 1959?
"We'd be given a picture of the cover and were given the title, along with a few words," Armitage says. "From that you prepared the plot and wrote the story. One of the rules of the game was that you started off with a body - either two in bed or somebody dead."
Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Of course, anything such as individual or original authorship flies out the window: "There was a certain similarity to all my books." But who cares? All that means is that the writer was aware of her indebtedness and repetition.
And interestingly, the Australian pulp fiction industry boomed in response to a morals-based ban on U.S. imports of pulp fiction. It's bad to import the stuff, but okay to produce it locally? Hey, censorship is good for business!
Posted by senioritis at February 20, 2005 12:58 PM
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Comments
What an excellent activity for a writing class! Well, perhaps a slightly sanitized version for first-year comp. SU's library has an excellent digitized collection of dime-novel covers at http://libwww.syr.edu/digital/images/s/StreetAndSmith/covergallery/covers2.htm
Posted by: susansinclair at February 20, 2005 01:28 PM
So cool! Interesting that some of the covers in the SU collection indicate that Street & Smith published some of these dime novels. I'd previously only heard of Street & Smith as publishing (at one time, at least) an authoritative end-of-summer guide to the upcoming season of college football.
Posted by: senioritis at February 20, 2005 02:16 PM