The fear of sinking
Subtitle: the American success formula in the Gilded Age
By: Paulette D. Kilmer.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 230
Subjects: Success in popular culture -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918.
Description: Throughout American history, the obsession with success has been a persistent and pervasive theme. It is an obsession that has shaped all arenas of life, and at its heart lies a profound discontent: the fear of "sinking," of failing to do better than someone else, particularly one's parents or siblings.

In this provocative study, Paulette D. Kilmer examines the ways in which the national preoccupation with success and its attendant anxieties have been manifested in popular culture. Her focus is on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - an era in which industrial growth and urbanization wrought enormous changes in the country.

Faced with the insecurities and dislocations caused by this social transformation, Kilmer shows, millions of Americans sought reassurance and inspiration in the popular press. Through a variety of genres - including news accounts, dime novels, romances, mysteries, religious epics, children's books, and domestic fantasies - the burgeoning publishing industry fed a seemingly insatiable public appetite for stories of success.

.

Analyzing contemporary newspapers and more than forty representative works from the period, Kilmer shows how retellings of the Cinderella story, which embodied the "rags-to-riches" paradigm, permeated all of the popular genres and not just the famous Horatio Alger serials. The formula plots used in these genres, she argues, derived from an earlier oral tradition.

Readily adapted to the form of the novel and updated with references to current events, these tales proposed to teach their readers how to balance spiritual and worldly well-being.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [197]-212) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : passing through the eye of the needle; title: News and fiction : prescriptions for living; title: The magic formulas of the people's press; title: "Book soap" : clean thoughts for clean folks; title: The fear of sinking; title: Why children read success tales; title: Biography; title: truth or legend?; title: The repulsive fascination of fires; title: Fantastic reality and realistic fantasy; title: Epilogue : the inevitability of sinking; title: success in the nineties.