| dc.description |
By the outbreak of the Civil War, the kind of highbrow psychological romance that Hawthorne and Melville had brought to a brilliant consummation in the 1850s had clearly lost favor both with critics and with the reading public. At the same time, middlebrow domestic fiction with a religious emphasis in the manner of Susan B. Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), and the “sensation novel” of physical adventure aimed at an even less literate audience, were gaining more and more readers. During the 1860s the field of American fiction was dominated by weekly story papers serializing this popular fiction, and the closely related series of dime novels published by the firm of Beadle & Adams and its competitors. Such material was ground out according to formulas in an essentially industrial process; it had little bearing on the development of serious literature. |
