Books published by The Popular Press

This book looks at the character types and plot patterns found in the urban stories of William Potter (known as O. Henry), analyzing how these elements structure his tales and contribute to his popular formulas. Karen Charmaine Blansfield considers how the turbulent conditions of New York at the turn of the century helped to launch his career.

This volume is about puppetry, an expression of popular and folk culture which is extremely widespread around the world and yet has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. Puppetry, which is intended for audiences of adults as well as children, is a form of communication and entertainment and an esthetic and artistic creation. Of the many aspects of puppetry worthy of scholarly study, this book's focus is on a central and dominant feature humor and comedy."

The sexualized serial murder of women by men is the subject of this provocative book. Jane Caputi argues that the sensationalized murders by men such as Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Hillside Strangler, and the Yorkshire Ripper represent a contemporary genre of sexually political crimes.

Private Eyes is the complete map to what Raymond Bhandler called "the mean streets," the exciting world of the fictional private eye. It is intended to entertain current PIfans and to make new ones."

Ed McBain is a master of tone. He turns his material just a little off-axis. George Dove s study of McBain s imaginary city is both insightful and realistic. He gets at the heart of this major writer of police procedurals by examining the geography, the day-to-day happenings, and literary quality."

This is the first collection of short stories by W.T. Ballard. This volume is just a sampling of Ballard's most famous character Bill Lennox, a selection for both the connoisseur of crime and the lover of good, fast-moving crime/adventure stories.

Greyhound, the largest and most enduring bus company in the US, had its beginning in the 1920s in the frigid climes of northern Minnesota. This work shows how the Greyhound Corporation has turned into a multimillion-dollar company.

This work is a composite index of the complete runs of all mystery and detective fan magazines that have been published, through 1981. Added to it are indexes of many magazines of related nature. This includes magazines that are primarily oriented to boys' book collecting, the paperbacks, and the pulp magazine hero characters, since these all have a place in the mystery and detective genre.

A Pillar of Fire to Follow concerns the Indian dramas, a series of popular, nineteenth-century American melodramas that deal with the interaction of Indians and Anglo-Europeans. Priscilla Sears has analyzed these works from a mythological point of view, concentrating on the myths of Indian and Anglo-European identity and destiny and the ways in which they relieve the guilt emanating from contemporary Indian policy and the symbolic betrayal of fathers.

This collection of insightful essays by outstanding artists, anthropologists, historians, classicists and humanists was developed to broaden the study of popular culture and to provide instances of original and innovative interdisciplinary approaches.Its first purpose is to broaden the study of popular culture which is too often regarded in the academic world as the entertainment and leisure time activities of the 20th century. Second, the collection gives recognition to the fact that a number of disciplines have been investigating popular phenomena on different fronts, and it is designed to bring examples of these disciplines together under the common rubric of "popular culture." Related to this is a third purpose of providing instances of original and innovative interdisciplinary approaches. Last, the collection should be a worthwhile contribution to the component disciplines as well as to the study of popular culture.

This collection of essays probes the values in a variety of authors who have had in common the fact of popularity and erstwhile reputation. Why were they esteemed? Who esteemed them? And what has become of their reputations, to readers, to the critic himself? No writer here has been asked to justify the work of his subject, and reports and conclusions about this wide variety of creative writers vary, sometimes emphasizing what the critic believes to be enduring qualities in the subject, in several cases finding limitations in what that writer has to offer us today.

Alabamians have always been a singing people. The settlers who moved into the various sections of the state brought with them songs which reflected their national origins and geographical backgrounds, and as they spread into the hills and over the lowlands they created new songs out of the conditions under which they lived. Also, they absorbed songs from outside sources whenever these pieces could be adapted to their sentiments and ways of life. Thus, by a process of memory, composition and recreation they developed a rich body of folk songs. The following collection a part of the effort to discover and preserve these songs.

This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

While the heroes of American literature are out hunting bears, or fighting wars, the heroines are back home. These female protagonists are trapped within a social context, and so their stories tell us about life as it was actually lived. Some heroines choose to conform, others question and confront those in power. This book explores American literary heroines from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Gail Godwin. Exploring two types of heroine, the book produces a picture of an American culture that embraces the mindless child and scorns the questioning woman; one in which economic values form and deform social identity."

The essays in Vision/Re-Vision analyze in detail ten popular and important films adapted from contemporary American fiction by women, addressing the ways in which the writers'' latent or overt feminist messages are reinterpreted by the filmmakers who bring them to the screen, demonstrating that there is much to praise as well as much to fault in the adaptations and that the process of adaptation itself is instructive rather than destructive, since it enriches understanding about both media.

Raymond Chandler''s eminence as a mystery writer is unchallenged. Somerset Maugham and George Grella both rate him above Dashiell Hammett; Eric Partridge deems him "a serious artist and a very considerable novelist," while praising him as "one of the finest novelists of his time." Peter Wolfe examines the many sides of Chandler and his work-his apparent will to self-destruct, his obsession with beautiful women, and his apparent brush with homosexuality-and casts much new and needed light on this major American author.

Cemeteries are open cultural texts, available to be read and appreciated by anyone who takes the time to learn their special language. Ethnicity and the American Cemetery explores the manner in which ethnic groups in America have made their cemeteries a most eloquent voice for the expression of values and worldviews.      Contributors examine the material objects found within the cemeteries, as well as the customary practices bound to them. Contributors are from the fields of folklore, cultural history, historical archaeology, landscape architecture, and philosophy. Heavily illustrated, the volume also features an extensive annotated bibliography.

The journals and diaries of John M. Roberts provide an intimate view of the life and dthoughts of a young schoolmaster, miller, itenerant bookseller, and farmer in centreal Ohio in a time of rising sectional crisis and Civil War.

From Edwin S. Porter to Mike Nichols, from D. W. Griffith to Steven Spielberg, American filmmakers have looked to the novel for story ideas. Different in its complexities from the classic novels of Dickens, London, and Tolstoy to which earlier filmmakers turned, the contemporary American novel poses a real challenge to the filmmaker, who must translate its occasionally unfilmable essence for a new audience. "Take Two" closely analyzes the adaptations of ten such works: "Catch-22," "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Being There," "The World According to Garp," "Sophie's Choice," "The Color Purple," "Ironweed," "Tough Guys Don't Dance," and "Billy Bathgate,"

Beginning with the emergence of commercial American music in the nineteenth century, Volume 1 includes essays on the major performers, composers, media, and movements that shaped our musical culture before rock and roll.

Brian J. Frost presents a full-scale survey of werewolf literature covering both fiction and nonfiction works. He identifies principal elements in the werewolf myth, considers various theories on the phenomenon of shapeshifting, surveys nonfiction books, and traces the myth from its origins.

Presents interesting and unusual George Armstrong Custer legends, which include the alleged fathering of Monahseetah's Indian son; the Annie Jones story buried in the National Archives; Custer's capture of Lee's supply trains at Appomattox Court House that caused Lee to surrender - and much more.

The essays collected here explore the power and sensuality that food engenders within literature. The book permits the reader to sample food as a rhetorical structure, one that allows the individual writers to articulate the abstract concepts in a medium that is readily understandable. "

A distinguished physician and professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, and a forensic expert for the British Crown, Joseph Bell was well known for his powers of observation and deduction. This biography of Bell is intended for those interested in Victorian medicine, in the history of detective fiction, and in Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.

A study of the technique of Agatha Christie's detective fiction. Providing an analysis of her accomplishments as a writer, the author demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for several years surprising variations within those conventions.

This profile of the man and the writer is an introduction to the personality behind "The Chapman Report" and "The Fan Club." Through correspondence, diaries, manuscript annotations, interviews and other private sources, the profile reveals the man who began as a sports stringer for a Wisconsin newspaper and is now one of the world's most popular novelists.

Editorial cartoonists are buffeted by unprecedented challenges from global computer information networks. Newspapers fail, colleagues are dismissed or harried, and they tussle over "selling" gags rather than satire. "Graphic Opinions" offers a path-breaking group portrait of these artists' attempts to reconcile economics with a sense of calling. The editors examine the current work and opinions of two dozen prominent cartoonists through profiles and essays about political and social issues. Four examples by each cartoonist illustrate this.

This text identifies three basic fictional forms dealing with murder and detection - mystery, detective and crime fiction. It attempts to express their interrelations, to define their differences, and to explain why these subgenres take the forms they do.