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COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
AS MOST ANYONE WHO HAS STUDIED POPULAR CULTURE WILL KNOW, one of the most difficult problems in researching the historical artifacts of popular culture is locating primary source materials. Tracking down the products of popular culture can be a difficult, time-consuming, and often frustrating job. It was something I encountered firsthand recently.
A few years ago, I came up with the idea of editing a collection of short stories written by Francis Stevens. Stevens was the pseudonym of an American woman named Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948) who published horror and fantasy stories in the pulp magazines in the years during and immediately following World War I. Stevens's work was something of an anomaly in the pulp fiction field. She helped to create a new type of narrative genre, modern dark fantasy, in a medium dominated by male writers, editors, and readers. She was a contemporary of A. Merritt and H. P. Lovecraft, and strongly influenced the fantasy and horror fiction of both. Yet, for today's readers, her important contributions have been mostly forgotten, and she has been dropped from the literary history of the period.
Having read a 1970 paperback reprint of Stevens's...
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