This book’s purpose is to demonstrate, via the examination of popular youth literature (primarily pulp magazines and comic books) from the 1920s through to the 1950s, that the stories therein drew their definitions of heroism and villainy from an overarching, nativist fear of outsiders that had existed before the Great War, but intensified afterwards. These depictions were transferred to America’s and “new and ” enemies both following the United States’ entry into the Second World War as well as during the early stages of the Cold War. This transference of nativist imagery displays a growing emphasis on ideological, as opposed to racial or ethnic, differences found in anti-foreign narratives, both showing early signs of modern American multiculturalism and indicating that pure racism was not the sole reason for the appearance of nativist rhetoric in popular literature. The process of change in America’s nativist sentiments, so virulent after the First World War, are explained by the popular, inexpensive escapism of the time, the pulp magazines and comic books of the early to mid-twentieth century.

Anti-Foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920-1960 PDF

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