At 09:32 PM 6/7/00 +0300, Juri wrote:
>And I just thought that we discussed why every
popular book seems nowadays to
>be pulp fiction! As for Fu Manchu, I'd say that Sax
Rohmer's influences
>are way
>beyond pulp, namely in Conan Doyle and Guy Boothby
and that kind of exotic
>adventure writers.
I have some 1890s Strand magazines, and they look like pulps,
but the paper was slick. The type of fiction in them is more
akin to American pulps than to American slicks. I think that
the greater wealth of England at the time permitted a better
grade of paper. If you don't consider Sherlock Holmes pulp,
then what about Prof. Challenger?
As for other exotic adventure, I think that it's pure pulp,
it's just that the market structure in England was different
than the US. I'm aware that Fu Manchu's US appearances were
in slicks (Colliers, I believe) but were his adventure tales
(or Kipling's) all that different from, say, Talbot
Mundy?
The direction I'm going here is that I think that my
definition of pulp is that, if it was written in the time of
the pulps, and it wouldn't look out of place serialized in
Adventure, or Argosy, or Thrilling Detective, or Weird Tales,
or Short Stories, or, .... Then it is pulp fiction,
regardless of where it appeared. After the pulp era, well, if
you could transport it back to the pulp era, would it fit
in?
YMMV,
Ray
P.S. The Caine Mutiny was considered trashy back in it's day.
Pulp? Probably not.
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