Introduction: You can’t quite laugh at the pulps

Writing in 1947 in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno frame popular magazines as outgrowths of “the culture industry,” an extension of industrialized capitalism steered by dehumanizing, instrumental logic. The culture industry, for Horkheimer and Adorno (2010), was a “ruthless unity” of newspapers, radio programs, films, and magazine fiction that enthralled consumers to capitalism’s constraining forms of consciousness. Modernist little magazines, middlebrow magazines, and pulp magazines: print media distinctions were a mere distraction. They disavowed gradations of cultural value, preferring to view individual print media designed and deployed by “the culture industry” with equal suspicion. Interwar modernity was a transitional period in popular print history. Although cheap books for an increasingly literate mass reading public had become available at the turn-of-the-century the growing mass readership between the wars turned beyond hardbound books to newspapers, magazines, story papers, dime novels, and pulp magazines for their reading material; Contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno’s cynical view, marked differentiations do matter when it comes to print material, a key premise of this special issue of The Journal of American Culture on pulpwood magazines.