You've shed some light, Kerry, on that box of thirty 1950s
Westerns I bought for a dollar a couple of weeks ago. When I
looked at the cover blurbs, nearly all seemed to have a
revenge motif, a "they didn't know who they were messing with
when they cheated [our protagonist]" sort of plot line. I
guess I was expecting boks more along the lines of the Lone
Ranger, but not one of them looked worth reading.
Is whatever is today's equivalent of
this "men's fiction" still based on this revenge theme? Or
was it peculiar to that era? In either case, why? Now there's
a topic for a doctoral dissertation.
Plus nearly all the cover art on
those cowboy books featured gaunt men. I'm figuring that was
prior to all those Charles Atlas ads.
Joy http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/003979.html
Kerry J. Schooley explained:
> I'm not going to knock Spillane. I think his appeal
lies largely in his
> strength at creating revenge fantasies. The desire
for revenge is a very
> durable human emotion, and Spillane gets at it
directly, without a lot of
> self-justifying debate. You might say the book that
precedes the blow-away
> final act is all self-justification, but if that's
the case it's a
> one-sided debate. Real debate would just get in the
way of the emotion,
> which Spillane loads like the gun he fires in the
final scene. Like Jim
> said, Spillane knows how to manipulate readers'
emotions. The writing is
> to
> the purpose and I suspect The Mick's stories will be
read long after the
> political context of his yarns have
faded.
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor
--------------------~--> Something is new at Yahoo!
Groups. Check out the enhanced email design.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/SISQkA/gOaOAA/yQLSAA/kqIolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email
to:
rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 11 Jul 2006 EDT