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Article: Dime Novels and Historical Romances
- Article from:
- American Eras
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Gale Research Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Dime Novels and Historical Romances
Sources
A Book for a Dime.
During the 1880s and 1890s the American literati assumed the mantle of social reform and scientific inquiry. William Dean Howells defended the anarchists arrested in Chicago
’
s Haymarket bombing. The normally aloof Henry James wrote two expressly
“
political
”
novels,
The Bostonians
(1886) and
The Princess Casamassima
(1886). And the young writers known as naturalists began to spin progressively darker and grimmer tales of urban malaise, social inequity, and
individual pathology. The reading public clamored for a little escapism and found it in the dime novel. Before the Civil War American readers
...