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Discrimination through Italian American Caricature in 19th and 20th Century Dime Novels
Michael DiBacco*, Madeline Miller*, Lillian Wright*, Allison Groves* and Nancy Caronia
Department of English, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26505
Presentation Category: Human Engagement (Poster Presentation #133)
Student’s Major: English and Biology
Dime novels and associated ephemeral literature were the most popular form of American entertainment reading during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though modern genres such as detective fiction and Westerns can trace many of their thematic tropes back to this often dismissed medium, dime novels’ characterization of ethnic minorities is troubling. Their overt racism and xenophobia speak to the historical moment during which they were written and have allowed researchers to glean a sense of the public’s reactionary response to the rapid cultural diversification of their time. While analogous research projects have dissected the harmful caricatures of groups like African Americans and women contained within these stories, the prevalence of Italian Americans has regularly been discounted, despite these characters appearing, often antagonistically, in around 11% of the 568 novels which this project has so far considered. This study aims to remedy this attitude and associated knowledge gap in dime novel research by locating and characterizing instances of Italian American othering/minstrelsy in some of the period’s benchmark publications like The New Nick Carter Weekly and The Wide-Awake Library. Such analysis facilitates consideration of the biases harbored by their authors’ demographics as well as the origins of Italian American stereotypes propagated by American pop culture for decades afterward. This presentation discusses the ongoing work of this two-year project with emphasis on what Madeline Miller and I have discovered during our time with it. (Should be Italics on book titles. See additional document)
Funding:
Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: a WVU 297-level course