Neighborhood novels in American literature
Date
2014
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The first urban capitals that emerged in the United States remain among the ranks today: Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. Novels that portray the development of neighborhoods within these cities comprise the focus of my dissertation during a crucial period of American literature that saw a push toward internationalism and a consequent re-imagining of what constitutes the American identity. As seats of the nation's economic and cultural production, nineteenth-century American cities became exponents of modernity and ubiquitous subjects of literary endeavor. An analysis of narrative methods and genre, Neighborhood Novels in American Literature traces numerous forms of writing the city, including travel accounts, journalism, and sociological studies, that authors incorporated into quintessential, and lesser known, city novels. Walking narratives set in distinctive neighborhoods prove crucial to showing the adjustment to life in the big city. The Philadelphia novels of George Lippard and Frank Webb reveal how remarkably integrated the city is through an awareness of its social geography; the neighborhood alternately festers with greed, corruption, and scandal among its loftiest ranks and stands as a bastion of civility for an insurgent middle class during a period of social conflict that distinguishes this period of Philadelphia history. As antecedents to the social reform impulse evident in novels of realism at the end of the century, Lippard's The Quaker City (1844) and Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1858) have other patterns in common with their descendants. Narrative tours of Philadelphia, Boston, and New York dramatize and also lend eyewitness authenticity to their fictional retelling. The eye of a tourist, a returned expatriate, a journalist, a literary magazine editor, and a musician, all guide the reader on walking tours throughout the expanding purlieus of Boston and New York, as well. Conceptualizing the state of American cities as transformational, rather than monumental, the novels of William Dean Howells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson also recognized that neighborhoods, defined by race and class, as well as geography, provided microcosms of culture central to what Henry James foresaw as "the dauntless fusions to come." In Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), An Imperative Duty (1892), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890); in Dunbar's Sport of the Gods (1901); in Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), migrants to and settlers in Boston and New York neighborhoods changed the cultural landscape of the city as much as those neighborhoods changed the lives of the characters themselves; this group of writers would find in the American cityscape the great untold story of the new century. Neighborhood Novels in America Literature is also a study of genre. Adapting forms such as the travel narrative, the journalistic exposé, and the editorial commentary, "the neighborhood novel" promises to change our understanding of the evolution of the American form of the novel, as well as the fluid boundaries between fields as supposedly different as journalism and fiction, the arts and sciences.