Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers

From Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code

Sarah Churchwell, Thomas Ruys Smith

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441195135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1

Introduction

Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith

Must read

Over the last three or four decades, academic and critical interest in popular culture has exploded, but this explosion has produced (as explosions will) scattershot, unpredictable, and disconnected flare-ups of concentration and flashes of enthusiasm. In terms of American popular literature, a few clusters of intellectual inquiry can be identified: first, surveys of the history of the bestseller, which broadly chart the kinds of books that have interested the American public over the centuries, without necessarily engaging closely with the texts in question. There has also been a constellation of influential books focused more narrowly on the popular writing (usually novels) of a particular historical era, with less breadth of chronological coverage but more depth of textual analysis. More recent are what we might call theoretical inquiries into the production and meanings of popular writing (again usually reduced to fiction), and its relation to cultural value, especially in the contemporary moment. There has also been an upsurge of interest in the category of “middlebrow fiction,” which may or may not be bestselling. And finally, there have been essay collections focusing on individual “blockbuster” bestsellers, reading milestone publications more or less in isolation from other blockbusters.

Within all of this activity, however, there has never been a comprehensive critical monograph that offers close readings of individual bestsellers in the United States across its four centuries of existence, and no comprehensive survey of bestselling texts has been published in more than half a century. This collection seeks partially to redress that omission, by considering—and reconsidering—a variety of influential and under-examined popular works in American cultural history within a comparative and developmental context. Must Read: Rediscovering the American Bestseller examines a range of American bestsellers across the centuries, reading these books as both individual texts and in relationship with one another.

This seems a vital moment for such a consideration of the evolution of popular taste(s). As Jim Collins has recently argued in Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, we are living in a moment marked by a particularly “robust popular literary culture,” driven by, among other forces, “the ubiquity and velocity of delivery systems in the form of superstores and online book sales” and “the increasing synergy among publishing, film, television and Internet industries.” The contemporary literary scene is, therefore, Collins concludes, “a complicated mix of technology and taste, of culture and commerce.”¹ And yet, as the essays in this collection amply demonstrate, such a formula might be applied to any period over the last 200 years. To understand what popular literature means, we still need to gain a more rounded understanding of what it has meant.

To begin, we need to ask what constitutes an “American bestseller” in the first place. We have chosen the term “bestseller” because it continues to be used by the publishing industry and the broad reading public, and is in fact more heuristically neutral than some of the more common scholarly rubrics, such as “popular” or “mass” “literature.” Each of these words could be said to beg the questions it is supposedly answering: which books count as “literature” and which don’t? What is the difference between the “popular” and the “mass”? All of these terms come accompanied by decades of complex scholarly argument about popular culture in an industrial-capitalist age. They also carry with them entrenched cultural biases, as scholars such as Lawrence W. Levine have influentially argued:

We have found it difficult to study popular culture seriously, not primarily because of the restraints of our respective disciplines—which are indeed far more open to the uses of popular culture than we have allowed ourselves to believe—but because of the inhibitions inculcated in us by the society we inhabit. From an early age, we have been taught that whatever else this stuff is, it isn’t art and it isn’t serious and it doesn’t lend itself to critical analysis.²

Levine’s assertions are no less true today than they were nearly 20 years ago, and we take them to offer a useful description of the continued denigration not only of popular culture per se, but also still, within certain academic communities, of scholarly engagement with popular literature, a resistance deeply embedded in discourses of cultural value. For self-appointed guardians of “high culture,” this resistance circles around the ominous charge of “dumbing down”: the “easier” the text, the less academically respectable some scholars continue to deem it, as the modernist exaltation of the difficult proves a particularly tenacious and dogged academic value. Alternatively, those viewing themselves as hostile to “high culture” may still resist various forms of “low culture” as being politically suspect and artistically inauthentic, and contest the meanings of “mass culture” or “the popular.” These ideological positions are as persistent as they are familiar, and they continue to shape and define a great deal of academic engagement with popular literature, as do other assumptions about literary value (including the perennial question, “But is it any good?”).

Levine also points the way to a solution, however: borrowing from him we might suggest a distinction between works that are widely accessible and works that are widely accessed. By definition, such popular culture is mass culture, as it is mass-produced and mass-disseminated. But, as Levine points out, not all mass culture is popular, although it is the case in an industrial society that most popular culture (in the sense of being well-liked and widely accessed, rather than in the sense of being grassroots folk culture) is also mass culture. Thus, the term “bestseller,” despite its many problems, removes us from this value-laden, inconsistent, arbitrary, and confusing terminology, with its vexations about whether the texts we are discussing “belong” to the masses, the people, the folk, the author, the academy, or hegemonic industrial-capitalism. The bestseller becomes a comparatively neutral (although still intransigently problematic) indicator of a text that is, historically speaking, prima facie “popular,” in every sense of the word, in an industrial age of mass production.

But this is not to ignore the semantic and definitional vagaries surrounding the term “bestseller.” Some of the impediments to establishing what does and does not constitute a bestseller are dealt with by Sarah Garland in our first chapter, “Missing Numbers: The Partial History of the Bestseller”; however, it should still be useful to offer some clarification here. In the main, this volume addresses texts whose sales to a high enough portion of the reading public place them self-evidently in the category of a bestseller, texts whose massive popularity made them contemporary cultural, and sometimes historical, phenomena. (The term “American” in truth proves no less problematic than “bestseller,” but it will be used more forgivingly. We use “American” conventionally to refer to the readers and authors of the United States; it remains for other volumes to consider the popular literature and markets of the Hispanophone Americas and Canada.)

The essays in this collection thus enter into an ongoing debate about the value of popular literature—or, at least, the types of popular literature that have often been met with scholarly suspicion, if not outright dismissal. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, “Intellectuals and artists always look suspiciously—though not without a certain fascination—at dazzlingly successful works and authors, sometimes to the extent of seeing worldly failure as a guarantee of salvation in the hereafter.”³ New Critical antagonism toward popular fiction still seems to hold sway, and its roots run deep, back to books like Q.D. Leavis’ still-influential 1932 analysis of bestsellers, Fiction and the Reading Public, which likened a taste for popular fiction to a “drug habit” that blocks “genuine feeling and responsible thinking by creating cheap mechanical responses and by throwing their weight on the side of social, national, and herd prejudices.”⁴

A postwar bestseller boom helped to question this kind of cultural snobbery toward the tastes of the “herd,” and precipitated the appearance of two groundbreaking studies of the American bestseller: Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes (1947) and James D. Hart’s The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950). As Mott argued, explicitly attacking the assumptions made by critics like Leavis: “Only the cynic and the heedless can disregard popular literature. Here the sociologist finds material for his inquiries into the mores, the social historian sees the sign-posts of the development of a people, and students of government observe popular movements at work.”⁵ Sociologists and historians aside, the work of pioneering critics like Mott and Hart failed to inspire systematic critical attention to bestselling texts. After the first generation of significant critical trailblazing into noncanonical American literature by such important scholars as Jane Tompkins, Lawrence Levine, Cathy N. Davidson, and Michael Davitt Bell, the history of American popular fiction continued to be addressed in a largely ad hoc way in individual journal articles and book chapters or as individual case studies in the battleground of the long (and increasingly Pyrrhic) “culture wars.”

Indeed, what critical attention individual American bestsellers have received over the last few decades has almost exclusively focused on a handful of the greatest blockbusters, books whose historical impact was sufficient to overcome qualms about their literary significance or aesthetic quality: The Last of the Mohicans, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Gone with the Wind, have all accrued significant scholarship, including monographs and edited collections devoted to understanding their place in American literary history. This volume seeks, by contrast, to return more critically neglected but historically popular texts to the frame. Such decisions are necessarily relative: Charlotte Temple and Peyton Place, for example, have by no means been critically ignored, but neither do they have volumes of scholarship devoted to them in the manner of The Last of the Mohicans or Gone with the Wind, nor is their significance uncontested. By the same token, we have also excluded from consideration those “classic” books whose perennial global popularity demonstrably correlates with their elevated position in the orthodox literary canon, such as Huckleberry Finn or The Great Gatsby.

Our effort, therefore, has been to maintain historical coverage of representative texts, but not to fall back on simply focusing yet again on the same three or four tex...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Missing numbers: The partial history of the bestseller
• 3 The history of Charlotte Temple as an American bestseller
• 4 “Like beads strung together”: E. D. E. N. Southworth and the aesthetics of popular serial fiction
• 5 Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and the visual culture of temperance
• 6 “The Man Without a Country”: Treason, expansionism, and the history of a “bestselling” short story
• 7 Exhilaration and enlightenment in the biblical bestseller: Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ
• 8 “Absolutely punk”: Queer economies of desire in Tarzan of the Apes
• 9 Ornamentalism: Desire, disavowal, and displacement in E. M. Hull’s The Sheik
• 10 Small change? Emily Post’s Etiquette (1922–2012)
• 11 Blockbuster feminism: Peyton Place and the uses of scandal
• 12 Crimes and bestsellers: Mario Puzo’s path to The Godfather
• 13 Master of sentiment: The romances of Nicholas Sparks
• 14 The Kite Runner’s transnational allegory: Anatomy of an Afghan-American bestseller
• 15 The fiction of history: The Da Vinci Code and the virtual public sphere
• 16 Contributor biographies
• Index