Grant T. Smith, Ph. D.
Dime Novels -- Lecture Notes from Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns
·Term dime novel originally referred to pocket-sized, hundred-page books with woodcut illustrations on the paper covers but it came to designate any fiction selling between five and twenty-five cents.
·Turner's thesis: the frontier is the meeting point between savagery and civilization--where the nation experienced a perennial rebirth.The return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line had been a means of escaping the economic, geographical, and social confines of civilization, just as it had been a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.The fact of Westward expansion had produced the American intellect, the American character of individualism and materialism, and the healthy resistance to government that made U.s. democracy functional.
·The myth of the frontier is central to the nation's social and political imagination.From a cultural historian's point of view, it is not the material fact of the frontier, but the image, idea, and ideology of the frontier, that shape a national and nationalist psyche.
·Manifest Destiny
·Violence: The dime Western was the medium most responsible for disseminating that image of violence; it was the means of carrying a sensational, violent West with you while you rode on an elevated train in Manhattan or waited for the fighting to begin at Shiloh.While the frontier had offered actual escape from Eastern civilization (the Homestead Act of 1862 ceded 160 acres of government land to anyone who would cultivate it for five years), the dime novel offered imaginative escape from an increasingly urbanized East.
·Gender bond -- the difference between the male realm of adventure and a female world of domesticity.Effort to save a woman from villainous hands establishes a bond between Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill, which intensifies as Buffalo Bill progresses: "Mate, I loved you before better than I love my own life--I don't know now how I can love you more."The priority of the affection between men is finally accompanied by paranoid misogyny when Wild bill dreams of being murdered by the traitorous beauty Ruby Blazes and her friend Sal Perkins, both dressed in male attire.
·The dime novel marks the cultivation of what finally became the dime novel's chief readership: adolescent boys.
·Thomas Edison filmed acts from Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in the 1890s; for Edison, Edwin S. Porter directed and photographed The Great Train Robbery in 1903 demonstrating the power of editing to produce melodramatic narrative.