Back in February Taylor & Francis published the Routledge book The Irish and the Origins of American Popular Culture. It has a curiously dull and utterly irrelevant front-cover, which it seems that the entire series has been lumbered with. One would have though, for a $100+ book, that they might have made a bit more effort…
[cover image]
But, despite the shovelware cover, the contents page is far more promising and enticing. Two chapters may especially interest some readers of this blog…
* Chapter 3, “The Weird Tales, Spicy Detectives, and Startling Stories of Irish America: Pulp Magazines”:
“This chapter considers the pulp magazines that dominated early American popular culture and evaluates the profound influence they had in the shaping of Irish-American identity. Several notable types of pulp hero (cowboy, detective, G-Man, soldier, athlete, masked hero, fantasy adventurer) were defined in large part by Irish stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. Famous pulp characters like Hopalong Cassidy, Lance Kilkenny, Race Williams, Sailor Steve Costigan, and Super Detective Jim Anthony have roots in the Irish-American experience of the era. These characters played upon notions of the Irish as figures straddling the border between civilization and savagery to evoke an image of a new kind of American who was well equipped for the rapidly changing and chaotic century. Irish-American pulp stories often lack explicitly Irish cultural or historical references and instead focus on describing Irishness as a more generic Americanness. Similarly, the Irish-American character moved further from ethnic stereotype to become a generic masculine ideal. In several ways, the pulp magazines chronicle the formation of an assimilated Irish identity in the United States. This chapter presents a detailed case study of one of the most famous Irish-American pulp writers, Robert E. Howard, and his most famous pulp character, Conan the Barbarian.”
* Chapter 5, “Irish in the Panels and Gutters: Comic Strips”:
“The very first American newspaper comic strip character, The Yellow Kid, was a precocious Irish street urchin living in the tenements of New York. This bald-headed, big-eared Irish-American kid kicked off an era of innovation in American comics. Soon, Americans became enamoured with other Irish comic characters like Happy Hooligan and Jiggs & Maggie. Even later sensations like Dick Tracy and Little Orphan Annie participated in the public discourse on Irish ethnic identity and the assimilation of the Irish into mainstream American society. This chapter traces the development of Irish characterization in comics from the very beginning through the mid-century. Attention is given both to the work of famously Irish-American cartoonists like George McManus, who constructed his Irish characters from a perspective inside the ethnic group, and to non-Irish cartoonists like Harold Gray, who worked from the outside. Whereas many comic strips reveal a familiarity with old Irish stereotypes, some of the most notable comics of the era demonstrate a dynamic reformulation and hybridization of Irish identity in the popular imagination.”
