DOCSLIB.ORG

Copyright by Rachel Ann Wise 2014

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Copyright by Rachel Ann Wise 2014 Copyright by Rachel Ann Wise 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Rachel Ann Wise Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Losing Appalachia: Genre and Local Color’s Out-of-Place Objects, 1870-1920 Committee: Coleman Hutchison, Supervisor Phillip Barrish Matt Cohen Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt Gretchen Murphy Losing Appalachia: Genre and Local Color’s Out-of-Place Objects, 1870-1920 by Rachel Ann Wise, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 Dedication For Bill Jones and the others who have gone. Your veil has been lifted. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my chair, Coleman Hutchison, for reminding me “the dissertation is a goddamn marathon.” Were it not for his guidance, I would still be nursing a side-stitch somewhere around mile ten. His honest and insightful feedback was instrumental in framing this project. I am also grateful to my other committee members, Phillip Barrish, Matt Cohen, Elizabeth S.D. Engelhardt, and Gretchen Murphy, for the time and attention they provided at crucial stages in this process. Each in their own way has helped me better understand how I want to inhabit disciplinary conversations and the academic world. I am also indebted to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Library Company of Philadelphia for access to archival materials referenced in the dissertation. I wish to thank the friends and family who have given me emotional and intellectual support for which I can never fully repay them. Meghan Andrews, Laine Perez, Nikki Gray, Rachel Schneider, and Tekla Hawkins have been confidantes, encouragers, and truth tellers. My parents always believed I could do this and knew how to put things into perspective when the weeping and gnashing of teeth began. I am also grateful to Gary and Rose Burke of Frankfort’s The Meeting House Bed and Breakfast whose kindnesses and good food aided in the revision of “Losing Appalachia.” Finally, thank you, Craig, for not divorcing me. I probably deserved it v Losing Appalachia: Genre and Local Color’s Out-of-Place Objects, 1870-1920 Rachel Ann Wise, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Coleman Hutchison “Losing Appalachia” offers an alternative literary history of local color writing by touting a historically, culturally, and rhetorically situated Appalachia, one of the most perplexing of American regions. Most local color criticism takes the New England village as its starting point. Critics interested in material culture then interpret the sentimental folk objects found in the village as indicative of the genre’s middle-class investments and pastoral qualities. The project considers what it would look like to entertain the idea of a literature that is not written by—or concerned with elaborating on—the urban middle class. It proposes one way to make this intervention, which requires an attention to canon (texts) and things (material culture). In reading local color through Appalachia—a region long associated with aberrant cultural and material practices—“Losing Appalachia” argues for the importance of a ubiquitous though understudied form of material culture in local color texts: the cast off, repurposed, and inferior mass-produced product. Such material culture is out-of-place in local color texts, especially when it appears in ways that undercut dominant middle-class norms and expectations. vi Applying the theories of Michel de Certeau, the project focuses on how women writers like Rebecca Harding Davis, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Hunter Austin, Grace MacGowan Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman used material culture to maneuver within the gendered constraints of generic form, cultural imperialism, and capitalist systems. They are, what I term, meta-localists who, through intentional formal practices, think about how literature aestheticizes the local. These writers are interested in what local color can tell us about the local as steadfastly local rather than as an extension of urban middle-class subjectivity. The following chapters examine show how diverse objects and ideologies are always pushing up against one another, destabilizing binaries that have been key to critical narratives about local color: modern and primitive, urban and rural, and center and margin. “Losing Appalachia” stresses the rhizomatic qualities of the genre and its uses, thus taking issue with historicist and feminist critics who argue that local color only performs one kind of cultural work. vii Table of Contents PREFACE: Losing Appalachia ...............................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: Changing the Map ......................................................................3 LITERARY HISTORIES OF LOCAL COLOR ............................................3 WHY APPALACHIA?.................................................................................13 WHY MATERIAL CULTURE?..................................................................17 MULTIPLE ENTRYWAYS.........................................................................25 CHAPTER OVERVIEWS............................................................................32 CHAPTER TWO: Tourism and Performativity in Rebecca Harding Davis’s Appalachia and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Creole Louisiana...........................36 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................36 SILHOUETTES AND GENTEEL CRYSTALS..........................................41 PERFORMATIVITY AND THE LOCAL...................................................50 TOURIST TRAPS ........................................................................................56 RESISTING SYNECDOCHE AND METONYM.......................................71 ON GENRE AND THE PERSISTANCE OF THE LOCAL .......................81 CHAPTER THREE: The Local Production and Curation of Folk in Emma Bell Miles’s Appalachia and Mary Hunter Austin’s West...................................85 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................85 TEACHING THE PROGRESSIVE HOME.................................................91 REJECTING MIDDLE-CLASS NORMS..................................................102 CATALOGUING CIVILIZATION’S TRASHINESS...............................110 CURATING THE LOCAL AND THE INDIGENOUS HOME................117 ON GENRE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION .................126 CHAPTER FOUR: “Loving to fool” with Things in the Industrial Towns of Grace MacGowan Cooke’s Appalachia and Mary Wilkins Freeman’s New England ....................................................................................................................131 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................131 LOCAL COLOR AND “THE LABOR QUESTION”...............................137 viii CRITIQUING MATERIAL “UPLIFT” .....................................................141 LOVING TO FOOL WITH THINGS ........................................................159 LOCAL SOLUTIONS AND THE MARRIAGE TROPE .........................168 ON GENRE AND THE USES OF NOSTALGIA .....................................175 Coda: Aesthetics, Trash, and the War on Poverty ...............................................180 HEIR TO THE PROGRESSIVE THRONE...............................................180 AT THE CROSS-SECTION OF POVERTY AND THE PASTORAL.....185 TRASH-HEAP TACTICIANS...................................................................190 ON GENRE AND THE STEADFASTLY LOCAL...................................201 Afterword: Dynamite-Crate Doors ......................................................................204 Bibliography ........................................................................................................206 ix PREFACE: Losing Appalachia It never occurred to us that we were Appalachian until my father saw it in black and white: “Appalachian immigrant; or child of.” It was the early 1990s, and he was applying for work with the City of Cincinnati. People still made jokes about the Norwood hillbillies flocking to work at the General Motors assembly plant; my new schoolmates would query if my mother were also my sister. When we were made to think about it at all, we did not eagerly adopt the label. To be “Appalachian” was to be from somewhere else, to be a punch line. I spent my college years at a private liberal arts school where I endeavored to lose my accent and blend in. Through exclusion, course offerings reinforced the idea that Appalachia, rurality, and working-class were categories to be left behind, themselves sites of cultural absence. I learned that the academy, literature, “Culture” with a capital “C,” and the middle class were mutually constitutive. Losing the Appalachia in me seemed imperative at the time. But I was the student who patched and hemmed her pants with duct tape, went home to pickup beds held together with green clothesline. I could never quite give up the pleasure of stretching out the life of a thing. It still feels like a middle finger. There is satisfaction in subverting a socio-economic system that requires certain populations to participate at a disadvantage. In the graduate classroom, Appalachia seemed to me lost among American literature’s drawing rooms. Even criticism on local color writing has had little to say about
Load more

Recommended publications
  • News of Her Own: Harriett Beecher Stowe's Investigative Fiction
    News of Her Own: Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Investigative Fiction Mark Canada Essay originally published in Ignatius Critical Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 2009. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in September 1850, it made news—a lot of news. With predictably diverse opinions, newspapers across the country reacted to both the new law and its aftermath. The Constitution in Middletown, Connecticut, called on readers to support the rule of law, while the New Hampshire Sentinel, Farmer's Cabinet, and New York Independent strongly opposed it, using words such as "obnoxious", "odious", and "iniquitous". Reporting on the transfer of captured fugitive Henry Long's case to a district court, the New York Evangelist encouraged the "friends of freedom" to "contribute the means of carrying the case up to the Supreme Court, in case of Long's conviction." 1 One newspaper reader, however, was not content to let the press wage war on the Fugitive Slave Law or on slavery in general. "You don’t know how my heart burns within me at the blindness and obtuseness of good people on so very simple a point of morality as this", Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in a letter to her brother Henry Ward Beecher in February 1851. She continued, Must we forever keep calm and smile and smile when every sentiment of manliness and humanity is kicked and rolled in the dust and lies trampled and bleeding and make it a moment to be exceedingly cool! I feel as if my heart would burn itself out in grief and shame that such things are.
    [Show full text]
  • A History of Appalachia
    University of Kentucky UKnowledge Appalachian Studies Arts and Humanities 2-28-2001 A History of Appalachia Richard B. Drake Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Drake, Richard B., "A History of Appalachia" (2001). Appalachian Studies. 23. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/23 R IC H ARD B . D RA K E A History of Appalachia A of History Appalachia RICHARD B. DRAKE THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by grants from the E.O. Robinson Mountain Fund and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2001 by The University Press of Kentucky Paperback edition 2003 Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kenhlcky Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 12 11 10 09 08 8 7 6 5 4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drake, Richard B., 1925- A history of Appalachia / Richard B.
    [Show full text]
  • Religion and Realism in Late Nineteenth-Century American
    Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2009 Religion and realism in late nineteenth-century American literature Lisa Irene Moody Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Moody, Lisa Irene, "Religion and realism in late nineteenth-century American literature" (2009). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 134. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/134 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. RELIGION AND REALISM IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Lisa Irene Moody B.A., University of Chicago, 1986 M.A., Northwestern University, 1991 December 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Throughout the process of writing this dissertation, I have been guided by many excellent faculty and colleagues, each of whom has added significantly to this project. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the mentorship of my dissertation director, J. Gerald Kennedy, for his expert guidance, close readings, and overall interest in my graduate studies. Dr. Kennedy has promoted my work and held me to a high personal and academic standard, for which he himself has proven to be an apt role model.
    [Show full text]
  • Strategies for the Eradication Or Control of Gypsy Moth in New Zealand
    Strategies for the eradication or control of gypsy moth in New Zealand Travis R. Glare1, Patrick J. Walsh2*, Malcolm Kay3 and Nigel D. Barlow1 1 AgResearch, PO Box 60, Lincoln, New Zealand 2 Forest Research Associates, Rotorua (*current address Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Dublin Road, Galway, Republic of Ireland) 3Forest Research, Private Bag 3020, Rotorua Efforts to remove gypsy moth from an elm, Malden, MA, circa 1891 May 2003 STATEMENT OF PURPOSE The aim of the report is to provide background information that can contribute to developing strategies for control of gypsy moth. This is not a contingency plan, but a document summarising the data collected over a two year FRST-funded programme on biological control options for gypsy moth relevant to New Zealand, completed in 1998 and subsequent research on palatability of New Zealand flora to gypsy moth. It is mainly aimed at discussing control options. It should assist with rapidly developing a contingency plan for gypsy moth in the case of pest incursion. Abbreviations GM gypsy moth AGM Asian gypsy moth NAGM North America gypsy moth EGM European gypsy moth Bt Bacillus thuringiensis Btk Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki MAF New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry MOF New Zealand Ministry of Forestry (defunct, now part of MAF) NPV nucleopolyhedrovirus LdNPV Lymantria dispar nucleopolyhedrovirus NZ New Zealand PAM Painted apple moth, Teia anartoides FR Forest Research PIB Polyhedral inclusion bodies Strategies for Asian gypsy moth eradication or control in New Zealand page 2 SUMMARY Gypsy moth, Lymantria dispar (Lepidoptera: Lymantriidae), poses a major threat to New Zealand forests. It is known to attack over 500 plant species and has caused massive damage to forests in many countries in the northern hemisphere.
    [Show full text]
  • Agawa Canyon Train Tour
    NEW TOURS! 33 with Volume 30 January-December 2021 Welcome aboard one of the most popular train tours in North America, the Agawa Canyon Train Tour. This breathtaking journey is a one-day rail adventure into the heart of the Canadian wilderness! Through the large windows of our coaches, the beauty of the region will unfold, and you will experience the same rugged landscapes that inspired the Group of Seven to create some of Canada’s most notable landscape art. This one-day wilderness excursion will transport you 114 miles north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, over towering trestles, alongside pristine northern lakes and rivers and through the awesome granite rock formations and vast mixed forests of the Canadian Shield. There’s plenty to photograph during your excursion so be sure to pack your camera! Don’t miss this NEW tour! Book Early! See page 44 AGAWA CANYON for description TRAIN TOUR Niagara Falls & PLUS, SOO LOCKS BOAT TOUR See page 53 African Safari for description Canada’s Safari CRUZ’IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER Adventure FROM LE CLAIRE TO DUBUQUE, IOWA See page 55 See page 59 for description for description Maine Lobster Become Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn for the day when we join our Captain and Crew Festival & for a day on the Mighty Mississippi River! You will board an authentic riverboat, the “Celebration Belle” Rocky Coast of Maine departing from , for an 11-hour cruise on the Mighty Mississippi can be what you Lemake Claire, of it, aIowa learning and cruiseexperience north or to simply Dubuque, an enjoyable Iowa.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ideology of Self-Making and the White Working Class in Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills
    REDEN Revista Española de Estudios Norteamericanos / Noviembre 2020. Volumen 2 The Ideology of Self-making and the White Working Class in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills Sofía Martinicorena Universidad Complutense de Madrid Sofía Martinicorena The Ideology of Universidad Complutense Self-making and the de Madrid White Working Class in Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills ebecca Harding Davis’ novella Life in the Iron Mills, published in 1861 in R The Atlantic Monthly, is now considered a landmark of early American realism. This paper analyses the text’s depiction of the white working class and the ideological consequences of the myth of upward mobility and self-making, which are presented as an impossibility to Hugh Wolfe, the story’s main character. I will argue that Davis’ choice to offer a representation of the precarious lives of the workers of Northern industrial capitalism implies a criticism of the quintessentially American narrative of ABSTRACT upward mobility, and a subsequent reflection on how foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. More specifically, I will maintain that Life in the Iron Mills operates as a contestation to the myth of the self- made man, evinced by the comparison between Hugh Wolfe’s situation and that of the mill owners, who encourage his aspirations from an oblivious position of privilege. Lastly, Hugh’s tragic death will be taken as proof that the myth of self-making mystifies the actual social and economic dynamics of industrial capitalism. Key Words: Realism; Harding Davis; self-made man; capitalism; ideology.
    [Show full text]
  • Miasmatic Ghosts in Rebecca Harding Davis's 'Life in the Iron-Mills'
    Peterson: Miasmatic Ghosts 39 Miasmatic Ghosts in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’ Lauren S. Peterson University of California at Davis _____________________________________ Abstract: This paper accounts for the Gothic elements in Rebecca Harding Davis’s ‘Life in the Iron- Mills’ by contextualizing its references to ghosts within mid-nineteenth-century theories of miasma, industrial toxicity, and ghostology. I argue that we can read the ghosts in ‘Life in the Iron-Mills’ as manifestations of the mill’s toxicity. Through their deaths, the mill workers become miasma—a nineteenth-century concept defined as the disease-causing effluvia emanating from organic rotting matter. The iron mill’s hazardous air kills its workers, turning them into undead, disease-spreading agents. This process makes chemical and organic hazardous air indistinguishable in the narrative. Drawing on Stacy Alaimo’s ecocritical framework of ‘trans-corporeality,’ I elucidate the constant exchange of material between workers’ bodies and their toxic, ‘ghostly’ mill atmosphere. The Gothic, with its obsession over bodily boundaries, appositely describes this phenomenon. I show that the ghosts—as representations of dangerous air—have become ‘real’ for us. My reading of the ghosts as miasmatic also accounts for the story’s ending: Hugh’s death and reappearance to the narrator reveal his transformation into a specter comprised of toxicity. The narrator’s impulse to write the story in the first place, I argue, arises from this toxic haunting. Keywords: Miasma; trans-corporeality; material ghosts; realism; Gothic; Rebecca Harding Davis. Author contact: [email protected] Literary Geographies 5(1) 2019 39-53 Peterson: Miasmatic Ghosts 40 Near the opening of ‘Life in the Iron-Mills,’ the narrator invites readers into the stifling atmosphere of an Appalachian iron-works town: ‘I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia.
    [Show full text]
  • New Books Spring 2018 NEW BOOKS 1
    West Virginia University Press New Books Spring 2018 NEW BOOKS 1 This spring and summer WVU Press books received attention in the New York Times, Time magazine, and PBS NewsHour online—a powerful demonstration of the outsize impact of small publishers. We expect the new season’s books to generate just as much excitement. Our lead title is the work of a major poet writing at the intersection of environment, race, and social justice. Other books in the catalog explore the region’s history, IMAGE, OPPOSITE: music, and literature and provide firsthand accounts of Hawk’s Nest Dam, from Muriel the Appalachian experience that complement or chal- Rukeyser’s The Book of the lenge narratives coming from the big trade houses. Dead. Copyright: estate of Nancy Naumburg Goldsmith. As always, we have strong offerings in environmental humanities, higher education, and, under our Vandalia imprint, new short fiction. I think it’s a particularly strong set of books; my colleagues and I are proud to share it with you. HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW: Beginning in June of 1930, three thousand men dug a three-mile hole through a sandstone mountain near the town of Gauley Bridge for the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation. The company was building an electrometallurgical plant nearby, which needed an unlimited supply of power and silica, and the tunnel was determined to be the cheapest and most efficient source of both. A dam would be built to divert a powerful column of the New Derek Krissoff River underground and down a gradually sloping tunnel to four electrical genera- Director, West Virginia University Press tors; the ground-up silica rock harvested during excavation would be fed into the furnace in Alloy.
    [Show full text]
  • Transatlantica, 2 | 2019 the Right Tone for the Hardest Moments: Louisa May Alcott’S New York Stories
    Transatlantica Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal 2 | 2019 Creating the Child Audience: Media and the Invention of Modern American Childhood The Right Tone for the Hardest Moments: Louisa May Alcott’s New York Stories of Child Labor and Urban Benevolence in the Mid-1870s Daniela Daniele Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/14642 DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.14642 ISSN: 1765-2766 Publisher AFEA Electronic reference Daniela Daniele, “The Right Tone for the Hardest Moments: Louisa May Alcott’s New York Stories of Child Labor and Urban Benevolence in the Mid-1870s”, Transatlantica [Online], 2 | 2019, Online since 01 October 2020, connection on 29 April 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/14642 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.14642 This text was automatically generated on 29 April 2021. Transatlantica – Revue d'études américaines est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. The Right Tone for the Hardest Moments: Louisa May Alcott’s New York Stories ... 1 The Right Tone for the Hardest Moments: Louisa May Alcott’s New York Stories of Child Labor and Urban Benevolence in the Mid-1870s Daniela Daniele Introduction: More Letters from New York 1 Unlike civilized Boston, in Victorian America New York was unanimously criticized for the poor’s dehumanizing condition. Before Lydia Maria Child’s acclaimed Letters from New York (1843), the need for far-reaching urban social reform had already been tackled by another prominent woman traveler, Margaret Fuller. In 1844, the Dial’s first female editor published up to 250 reports on slavery, the Sing Sing prison, the mistreatment of Irish immigrants, and prostitution in the city slums, concluding that the philanthropic policies enacted by the half-way houses for the poor and the abused only deepened their conditions of dependence.
    [Show full text]
  • An Exploration of Poverty in Central Appalachia
    Original Article KOME − An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry An Exploration of Poverty in Volume 3 Issue 2, p. 75-89. © The Author(s) 2015 Central Appalachia: Questions of Reprints and Permission: [email protected] Culture, Industry, and Published by the Hungarian Communication Studies Association Technology DOI: 10.17646/KOME.2015.26 Cara Robinson Tennessee State University, Department of Social Work and Urban Studies, U.S.A. Abstract: By most government statistical definitions, Central Appalachia is one of the most impoverished regions in the United States. Many of the region’s residents are low- income, dependent on government benefits, have high rates of obesity and diabetes, and low rates of college educational obtainment. Central Appalachia is historically tied to the coal mining and railroad industries. Many scholars believe this historical bond created an internal colony of company-dependent residents who have been unable to transition successfully from those industry’s boom eras or escape the lingering effects of industry environmental, health and economic degradation. While coal mining stripped the land of Central Appalachia and often cheated its residents from access to economic well-being and opportunity by traditional American definitions, Central Appalachians have created a rich culture based on kinship, religion, fatalism and community pride. Today, significant questions arise regarding the impact of advanced communication technologies and the associated infiltration of a monolithic standard for American success; success defined by material gain idealized by middle-class suburban living. While advanced communication technologies are often praised for their capacity to advance education, employment and cross-cultural understanding, in regions such as Central Appalachia, they may undermine the foundation of culture the residents have built in order to survive decades of isolation and exploitation.
    [Show full text]
  • Reforming Readers: Agency and Activism in the Long Progressive Era
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository REFORMING READERS: AGENCY AND ACTIVISM IN THE LONG PROGRESSIVE ERA Benjamin Sammons A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2012 Approved by: Linda Wagner-Martin Jane Thrailkill Rebecka Rutledge Fisher John McGowan Robert Cantwell ABSTRACT BENJAMIN SAMMONS: Reforming Readers: Agency and Activism In the Long Progressive Era (Under the direction of Linda Wagner-Martin) This dissertation argues that between 1860 and 1945, a period that I call the Long Progressive Era, American fiction about poverty dramatizes a crisis of agency besetting the middle and upper classes. A pervasive unease about human volition arose among the affluent as the growing anonymity of urban life, the rationalization of many forms of labor, and the articulation of a thoroughly Darwinian worldview challenged liberal doctrines of autonomous selfhood. The activity of reading poverty fiction focused these bourgeois doubts because, first, it confronted the affluent with the disturbing spectacle of a stereotypically disempowered underclass and, second, it registered the increasing professionalization of both poverty relief and literary reading, two fields of labor to which the affluent citizen’s access was newly mediated by a class of proprietary specialists. Thus, the reading of poverty fiction became an exemplary negotiation of broadly philosophical and historically specific challenges to bourgeois agency. Unlike the post-World War II period, when similar anxieties about impersonal political and social institutions habitually devolved into paranoia, the interwar period I study retained a measure of balance in its agency crisis.
    [Show full text]
  • Literacy, Discourse, and Identity: the Orw King- Class Appalachian Woman Academic Sarah Marie Mcconnell [email protected]
    Marshall University Marshall Digital Scholar Theses, Dissertations and Capstones 1-1-2012 Literacy, Discourse, and Identity: The orW king- Class Appalachian Woman Academic Sarah Marie McConnell [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://mds.marshall.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, Creative Writing Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation McConnell, Sarah Marie, "Literacy, Discourse, and Identity: The orkW ing-Class Appalachian Woman Academic" (2012). Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. Paper 336. This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Marshall Digital Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses, Dissertations and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LITERACY, DISCOURSE, AND IDENTITY: THE WORKING-CLASS APPALACHIAN WOMAN ACADEMIC A Thesis submitted to the Graduate College of Marshall University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts English by Sarah Marie McConnell Approved by Dr. Kelli Prejean, Ph. D., Committee Chairperson Dr. Whitney Douglas, Ph. D. Dr. Jane Hill, Ph. D. Marshall University August 2012 For my mother, whose voice gave rise to my own. And for my brother, who shared in every moment of my childhood. Long live the Three Musketeers. ii Acknowledgments Writing is never done in a vacuum, and this is especially true for this project. I cannot begin to account for how intensely thankful (and apologetic) I am toward those who have supported me along the way. My mother, Linda McConnell, likely bore the heftiest burden, and any time (quite literally any time day or night) I needed to “talk out” an idea, read a passage aloud to an ear other than my own, or simply cry, it was to her I turned.
    [Show full text]