SOURCE: “Blood ’n Thunder: Virgins, Villains, and Violence in the Dime Novel Western,” in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. IV, No. 2, Fall, 1970, pp. 507-17.

In the following essay, Jones considers the relationship between sex and violence in dime novels, concluding that the genre promoted traditional American values even as it “provid[ed mass purgation through vicarious participation in fictional violence.”]

The plethora of violence is probably the most notable characteristic of the dime novel western. Certainly this was the case in the nineteenth century, for numerous clergymen, teachers, and moralists, angrily pointing out the deleterious effects of super-abundant bloodshed on the young minds of America, severely denounced the “lurid yellow-backed novels” as the bane of the age. “Instructors in some of the schools,” wrote W. H. Bishop in 1879, “report that every third boy reads such literature, and that he is the hardest to deal with. It is in...