Criminal tales as cultural trade: The production, reception, and preservation of Canadian pulp magazines

In Criminal Tales as Cultural Trade: the Production, Reception, and Preservation of Canadian Pulp Magazines, I re-construct the history of Canadian pulp magazines. I argue that these texts were, and still are, in a process of constant negotiation with the political, economic, and social conditions in which they circulate. As the literature of the working poor, pulps were dismissed as mass-market trash throughout the 1940s. That said, the magazines proclaimed themselves as sites for the establishment of a national literature. As such, the pulps employ a rhetoric of national identity that resists the cultural devaluation applied to them. The tensions surrounding the significance of pulp persist in the archival politics that inform their preservation at the National Library of Canada. As a whole, my work contributes to the established field of Canadian literature as well as the emerging fields of print culture studies, pulp magazine history, and working-class literary studies.