They did this by providing their stories or movies or radio plays to as wide an audience as they could reach. At the same time, we saw Hollywood ramping up its production as it circumvented the Edison Trust, and the new technology of radio actually brought live audio entertainment into people’s homes.Īll of these entertainment companies prospered at a time when the United States and Canada were experiencing some of the worst economic conditions since their founding. Entertainment exploded in this particular timeframe with pulp magazines competing with upscale, glossy magazines (nicknamed “slicks”). North America, in the grip of the Great Depression, was desperate for entertainment. These were magazines printed on cheap wood pulp paper and sold for a few cents at newsstands. In the United States and Canada, we progressed through dime novels at the turn of the century up to pulp fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. Even Charles Dickens, before the literati claimed him as one of their own, wrote stories that would sell to the widest audience possible. Of course, that didn’t stop authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer from creating stories that entertained. The authors who believed that literature was intended to elevate and to challenge wanted nothing to do with this cheap, quickly written marketplace. There were similar startups in France and the United States and elsewhere, but the common element was that publishers made money by selling entertainment. If you go all the way back to Victorian England and you see the start of the “penny dreadfuls,” you will see that publishers found a market for stories among the common people of England. I don’t want to go too deep into the history – that’s another show – but I do want to get an idea across that this was designed as entertainment for the masses. ![]() The medium however has a much older history. This amazingly successful movie essentially took the concept of pulp and made it its own. If you were to ask anyone what pulp fiction was, you would very likely have them say that it was that Tarantino movie that starred John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson. In a lot of respects, what constitutes pulp fiction is very much in the eye of the beholder. You would think there would be an easy answer for this, but the reality is that trying to define pulp fiction is currently trying to define art.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |