July / August 2002 Vol. 34, no. 4

Sensational Stories at the National Library of Canada

Sensational Stories: Pulp Literature at the National Library of Canada, an exhibition that showcases sensational popular literature of the 1940s and 1950s, will be on display until January 2003, in Exhibition Room A of the National Library of Canada, 395 Wellington Street in Ottawa. The exhibit is open to the public from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily.

Sensational Stories features examples of Canadian publications of the so-called "pulp" genre printed in the 1940s and 1950s. The magazines, digests and paper-backs on view are representative of the colourful detective, romance and western magazine stories and covers printed in English and in French. Because their activities were considered on the margins of literary production in Canada, most publishers did not keep their printed and production materials; certainly most were destroyed after it became illegal to own the kinds of crime magazines on display in this exhibition. Extant English-language publications in particular are rare and those on display at the Library are drawn from the archive of pulp publisher Al Valentine.

As part of the growing collection of popular culture publications preserved by the National Library of Canada, these pulp literature collections allow researchers to study the pulp magazine genre itself (a category which also includes comics, pulp novels and digests), and mass media in Canada generally. These unique collections also support research into the history of debate over indecency and obscenity in Canada, such as the censorship campaign that led to the passing of the so-called Fulton Bill in 1949 which made it an offence in Canada to print, publish, sell or own any magazine, periodical or book which exclusively or substantially comprises matter depicting pictorially the commission of crimes, real or imaginary."

The extreme and lurid nature of both the printed stories and the artwork that promoted them point to a sensational world even more distracting than the menacing aspects of real life in the period of the 1940s and 1950s, such as global warfare, genocide and capital punishment. As a genre, pulp detective stories and romantic fiction can be linked to other forms of mass media entertainment of the period that informed the normative social attitudes of the time, such as Hollywood movies, comic books, romance novels and tabloid photojournalism. In particular, themes of misogyny and murder can be located in related, but less low-brow forms of entertainment of the postwar period, including the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! The representation of a rampant, fragile and irrational modern world beset with crimes of passion, frontier violence, encounters with the extraterrestrial and illicit sexual congress was avidly consumed by an otherwise conservative Canadian populace firmly located within the boundaries of rational, sanctioned conduct.

Curbed in Canada by the force of law and rendered virtually obsolete with the advent of television broadcast, the sensational elements of this genre are recognizable today in the popularity of tabloid television and newspapers, romance paperback novels, low-budget horror films and interactive video entertainment.

To find out more about Sensational Stories or about the many other events and activities being held at the National Library of Canada this summer, call (613) 995-7969 or 1-877-896-9481 (toll free in Canada) or visit the Library’s Web site at www.nlc-bnc.ca and click on "What’s On."