Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (Haymarket) [Paperback]

Michael Denning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people began to read cheap novels and the ""fiction question"" became a class question. In a new afterword, Denning locates his study within the context of current debates on class and cultural studies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Highly influential ... one of the founding texts of cultural studies. -- The Chronicle of Higher Education

Mechanic Accents abounds with new ways to think about America's ubiquitous popular culture. To those who think popular culture is funny, weird, exciting, absurd, or just plain entertaining -- anything but a moral quagmire -- Denning gives heart. -- Christine Stansell, Voice Literary Supplement

One of the most illuminating, theoretically informed accounts of popular fiction now available. -- Terry Eagleton

Path-breaking. -- Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Michael Denning was born in Vermont in 1954 and grew up in New York state, the child of school teachers. After studying at Dartmouth, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and Yale, he taught at Columbia and Weslyan and now works as Professor of American Studies at Yale University. The author of The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century and Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, he has written on American culture and politics for the Village Voice, Social Text, Radical History Review and History Workshop. Long active in union campaigns, he is a member of the National Writers Union. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut with Hazel Carby and the son Nicholas.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Verso; 2nd, revised edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 185984250X
• ISBN-13: 978-1859842508
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #283,459 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars peering out into the darkened theater, April 19, 2002

By 

Andrea Boykowycz "b-wycz" (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (Haymarket) (Paperback)

Mechanic Accents is an ambitious attempt to examine urban working class America at a pivotal moment in its industrial transformation, through the commercial and literary lenses of the nineteenth century dime novel, or cheap serialized fiction. Denning begins by describing the economics of dime novel production -- the 'culture industry' of pulp fiction -- and the experiences of dime novel authors, churning out thousands of words a week on salacious and exciting themes lifted from the news of 'real life'. This analysis demonstrates the difficulties of capturing and understanding the audience for these novels even for the contemporary writers producing them: essentially, the only way these writers had of understanding the values and experiences of the people they were writing for was the feedback of the marketplace -- what sold. Examining the evolution of narratives and characters, not just over the course of successive serial installments or sequels, but in the recollections and re-tellings of these stories by the readers themselves, Denning is able to discern changing attitudes towards work and the emerging working class, as well as aspects of class and national socialization -- both from within the emerging working classes as well as among the capitalist middle classes.

Denning's analysis draws heavily on Marxist literary and cultural theory, and from a historiographical perspective it's a very interesting product of the tail end of the republicanist revival of the early 1980s -- but the reader doesn't need to be acquainted with this meta-history to appreciate the book! Excellent insights for anyone interested in the history of print or print culture in America, the culture of the American working classes, or the censorial campaigns of middle-class moralists in whatever era.