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theses

This dissertation examines the ways in which American writers of regionalist fiction contended with the shifting political and economic landscape between 1880 and 1899. As the nation transitioned to a market-based economy after the Civil War, antebellum notions of property realigned to conform to an increasingly nationalizing and incorporating economy. Yet regionally-focused writers of the period demonstrate that pre-Civil War definitions of subject categories and rights shaped by local economic structures persisted. These writers resolve those conflicts instigated by the tensions between regional and nationally standardizing conceptions of property and ownership through violent formal tropes which function to metaphorically restructure their fictional subjects’ relationships to property within the region in question. By investigating three sets of literary works, each attuned to a region within the U.S., this dissertation identifies three regionally and economically distinct tropes of violence. In doing so, it also argues that each regionalist writer uses violence on the level of literary form to resolve the problem of wage labor’s effect on property rights after the Civil War, with each trope necessitating the regional subject’s confrontation with the marginalizing effects of economic stratification. The first chapter discusses Southern local fiction’s attention to the violence inherent in the persisting designation of the ex-slave body as property after the decline of the plantation economy. The second chapter examines urban literature’s stylistic declaration and resolution of the violence of immigrant labor exploitation within New York City’s industrialized economy. And the final chapter considers the structural function of symbolic violence within regional fiction of the male agrarian laborer in the West in light of those redefinitions of ownership precipitated by railroad speculation.

ETD_5310

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Sarah Anne Stubaus Goldfarb

doi:10.7282/T3Z899HD

ETD doctoral

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