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Manusya, Journal of Humanities

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

The proliferation of print media in early-twentieth-century Siam coincided with the rising popularity of folk vocal music. By the 1920s, certain styles of folk balladry were appropriated by urban writers for news reportage and sociopolitical criticism with doses of sensationalization. Published in periodicals and chapbooks, this popular literature was characterized by its versification of true crimes and its typical focus on the figure of the criminal or the ghost. My article examines this hybrid genre of news entertainment at the nexus of a modern structure of the horror experience, folk music tradition, print capitalism, and journalistic culture in Siam. It argues that the genre constituted an early wave of Thai sensationalist mass media that represented a new aesthetic of horror and violence as sources of popular consumption and morbid curiosity. It also shaped the public’s horror and gothic sensibilities and anticipated the lurid intensification of print sensationalism in post-wwii Thailand.

DOI

10.1163/26659077-20242722

First Page

1

Last Page

26

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