Popular Culture Review 30.1
in the middle of the series . In the novels , the reader gets to know Cherry and follows her through her years as a student nurse and later as a practicing registered nurse . Over the years , she works as an army nurse , a chief nurse , flight nurse , veterans ’ nurse , visiting nurse , cruise nurse , and so on . There is little she does not do . The books about the impulsive and intrepid Cherry Ames were written for girls , and they could be described as career novels , i . e . novels about young protagonists , often girls , pursuing a career ( cf . Finlay 1189 ). The focus on career and working life could be a reason why the novels became so popular in the United States and were exported to a number of countries in Western Europe .
Cherry arrived in Iceland first , then came to Norway , and some years later , to Sweden ( see The Cherry Ames Page ). In the Nordic countries , women have taken part in working life for quite some time ; it is therefore not surprising that it was in these countries , the first translations of the novels about Cherry Ames emerged . Moreover , in Norway , the books arrived at a perfect time since there was an increasing need for nurses ( Nygaard 50 ). If the novels , among other things , had the agenda of recruiting nurses for the Second World War , this did not stop them from also fulfilling a different purpose overseas in the postwar years . They filled both a practical purpose of recruiting nurses , and , most importantly , a purpose of educating and entertaining young female readers .
The Cherry Ames books fit into the category of popular literature . Previous research ( see e . g . Sapiro , “ Translation and the Field of Publishing ,” “ Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market ”) has shown that products of popular culture easily spread from the United States to parts of the world that have a smaller domestic production of popular culture . Iceland , and especially Norway , was marked by the war in the period when the countries imported and translated Cherry
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