Overview

This book provides an in-depth study of the production, sale, and content of the sensational canards - cheap news broad-sheets and booklets. It demonstrates the enormous popularity of this old news genre throughout the nineteenth century and its critical influence upon the eventual success of the mass-circulation tabloids, challenging much that scholars assume about the country's revolution in print. Informed by folkloric and cultural studies as well as literary theory, the book explores the incremental creation of textual meaning in the canards' authorship, production, distribution, and consumption. While the canards bear the stamp of modernization both through their makers' adaptation to innovations in manufacture and sale as well as in some of their content, Cragin exposes their resistance to the controls of the modern state and the ideas of modern criminal justice. The canard makers' resistance to new ideas about crime and justice, in turn, reveals surprising continuities in the popular imagination and its images of criminals, victims, policemen, courts, and punishment.

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9780838755792

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