The weird tales,spicy detectives,and startling stories of Irish-America: Irish characters in American pulp magazines |
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Authors: | Christopher Dowd |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of English, University of New Haven, Harugari Hall 300B, West Haven, CT 06516, USAcmdowd@newhaven.edu |
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Abstract: | The pulp magazines that dominated early twentieth-century American popular culture helped shape popular understandings of Irish-American identity. Several notable types of pulp hero (cowboy, detective, G-Man, masked hero) were defined in part by Irish stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. They played upon notions of the Irish as figures straddling the border between civilisation and savagery to evoke an image of a new kind of American who was well equipped for the rapidly changing and chaotic American century. Irish-American pulp stories often lack explicitly Irish cultural or historical references and instead focus on describing Irishness as a more generic Americanness. Similarly, the Irish-American character moved further from ethnic stereotype to become a generic masculine ideal. In several ways, the pulp magazines chronicle the formation of an assimilated Irish identity in the USA. |
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Keywords: | pulp magazines pulps Irish-America stereotype masculinity assimilation |
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