{"id":46317,"date":"2020-06-26T09:25:56","date_gmt":"2020-06-26T13:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=46317"},"modified":"2020-06-30T09:36:20","modified_gmt":"2020-06-30T13:36:20","slug":"emu-editions-publishing-house-reanimates-19th-century-pulp-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2020\/emu-editions-publishing-house-reanimates-19th-century-pulp-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Emu Editions’ publishing house reanimates 19th century pulp fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u201c \u2026 he saw her, and also to his horror saw that a lighted match was in her hand, and that she stood by a train of gun powder, which led to a barrel of the same dangerous material \u2026\u201d so writes Ned Buntline in The Volunteer, or<\/em> The Maid of Monterey. <\/em>The dashing tale, written to appeal to the drama-hungry common reader, was based on headlines from the Mexican-American War. Its cross-dressing heroine and other characters, noble and despicable, were based on figures from Buntline\u2019s own rougish life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Volunteer <\/em>is the first title published by Emu Editions<\/a> \u2013 the brainchild of Eastern Mennonite University Professor Mark Metzler Sawin,<\/strong> who has set out to reprint some of the most popular works of the 19th century that have largely been lost to history. Sawin, with the help of eight students, dug into records of Buntline\u2019s life and the turmoils of the day to annotate and contextualize The Volunteer.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This edition includes a biographical essay written by Sawin. Edward Zane Carroll Judson, who wrote under the pseudonym of Buntline, popularized genres such as Westerns, crime noir, and pirate novels for the American public of the mid- to late-1800s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sawin with a portrait of Buntline featured in the reprint of The Volunteer.<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s fun to research because he\u2019s an absolute scoundrel,\u201d Sawin said. Buntline\u2019s actual life was as swashbuckling as his fiction \u2013 he married nine times to eight women (one of them twice), survived an attempted lynching in Nashville, incited a riot over a Shakespeare play, apprehended two murder suspects single-handedly \u2013 the vignettes go on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And although Buntline was a household name in his heyday, most of his 170-some books were printed on cheap paper and never preserved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThose books tend to be almost nonexistent, even though they were bestsellers at the time,\u201d Sawin said. A few years ago, he drove to a tiny museum in the Adirondack mountains of New York with his daughter, Cora, because they had about 12 boxes of Buntline\u2019s writings. The papers were saved from a remote cabin Buntline had lived in during the 1850s and 60s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those boxes held \u201cthe only surviving copies of dozens of his novels that people thought were lost,\u201d Sawin said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He enjoys assigning Buntline in his 19th century history classes because, not only are the books a fun, \u201cweird\u201d read, but they also provide a snapshot of the national and cultural events of the time. In researching The Volunteer, <\/em>Sawin\u2019s students tracked down references to people and events scattered throughout the narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was \u201ca detective story of figuring out who all these figures are,\u201d Sawin said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Student researcher Lindsay Acker<\/strong> cracked the code on the main antagonist in The Volunteer \u2013<\/em> an attorney named Gorin, whose name was taken straight from Nashville attorney Franklin Gorin. Acker sleuthed out his identity through area newspapers from the mid-1840s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI found the name again in a list of speakers at a Whig party rally,\u201d Acker said. \u201cI just started following the rabbit trail and ended up finding letters and speeches published in the newspaper from a few book characters about various parts of the Nashville scandal. I also did some searching on family trees from FamilySearch.org, and found some familial connections in Nashville between characters that made a whole lot of sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a huge break to figure that out,\u201d said Sawin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The student team at the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference in Baltimore. From left: Alexandra Warren, Lindsay Acker, Clara Weybright, Mario Hern\u00e1ndez, Ethan Herman, Kyle Good, Professor Mark Metzler Sawin, Lydia Chappell Deckert, and Solomon Brenneman.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Last summer, the students accompanied Sawin to the Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association conference in Baltimore, where they presented their research. This trip was a highlight of the experience for Mario Hern\u00e1ndez.<\/strong> One of his contributions to cracking the code of Buntline\u2019s writing was to determine the origins of words that Buntline had misspelled or a typesetter had misinterpreted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere were two words for flowers that we had just assumed were created by Buntline \u2013 or \u2018sprang from Buntline’s fertile mind\u2019 as Mark eloquently explained,\u201d Hern\u00e1ndez said. \u201cUpon closer inspection, these words turned out to be misspellings of actual words in Spanish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sort of context makes the Emu Edition especially useful to college history and literature classes, which Sawin expects will be their main audience. He\u2019s selling the book through Amazon\u2019s print on demand service, which allows him to price it at $11.95 a copy. His goal is to make it affordable to assign to students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The heroine of The Volunteer<\/em> is merely the first character to be visited by Emu Editions. Sawin plans to engage students next year to work on another Buntline story, The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main, <\/em>a classic of the day that Mark Twain\u2019s Tom Sawyer reenacted scenes from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another he\u2019s considering is Ella Adams, or The Demon of Fire, <\/em>about a Yankee schoolmarm who is half lynched, rescued by enslaved people, and works with them to set literal fire to Charleston, South Carolina. And within the relatively small world of 19th century literature scholars, Sawin hopes to invite others to submit their own annotated titles to Emu Editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the name Emu? Sawin wanted another flightless bird in his logo as a riff on Penguin Random House publishing. The dodo was already taken by another company, and besides, working at EMU has given him an affinity for its homonym. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c \u2026 he saw her, and also to his horror saw that a lighted match was in her hand, and that she stood by a train of gun powder, which ... read more about ‘Emu Editions’ publishing house reanimates 19th century pulp fiction<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":46318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7931,17562,5642,5595,356],"tags":[9331],"feature":[17426],"class_list":["post-46317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts","category-digest","category-faculty-and-staff","category-history","category-language-and-literature","tag-mark-metzler-sawin","feature-myemu-feature"],"yoast_head":"\n'Emu Editions' publishing house reanimates 19th century pulp fiction - EMU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2020\/emu-editions-publishing-house-reanimates-19th-century-pulp-fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"'Emu Editions' publishing house reanimates 19th century pulp fiction - EMU News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"\u201c \u2026 he saw her, and also to his horror saw that a lighted match was in her hand, and that she stood by a train of gun powder, which\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2020\/emu-editions-publishing-house-reanimates-19th-century-pulp-fiction\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"EMU News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/EasternMennonite\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-06-26T13:25:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-06-30T13:36:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/43\/2020\/06\/DSC_0358_small.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2048\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1365\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Randi B. 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