Frenzied fictions: The writing of panic in the American marketplace, 1873--1913

This dissertation studies how American writers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era encountered, represented, and produced financial panics. The project has two related aims: to trace how panics emerged during these decades as objects of popular fascination, literary study, and scientific analysis; and to illuminate the varied uses to which novelists and other writers put their representations of these dramatic and baffling phenomena. Throughout, I focus on the ways panics invited and defied textual representation, and I discuss the ideological and commercial work popular representations of panics performed.;Chapter 1 discusses tourists' fascination with Wall Street in the 1870s and examines how panic's spectacular nature vexed the first generation of American writers committed to explaining panics to the public. Chapter 2 examines the panic fiction of Robert Barr, Edwin Lefevre, Frederic Isham, Upton Sinclair (The Moneychangers), and Theodore Dreiser ( The Financier) and elaborates the cultural, political, and philosophical uses to which these writers put their representations of financial panics. Chapter 3 studies the muckraker and stock promoter Thomas Lawson, America's most sensational panic writer, focusing on the catastrophic agency of his writing in the marketplace and on his astonishing campaign to reform Wall Street by producing panics. Chapter 4 analyzes the convergence of two nineteenth-century traditions of the sublime, the economic and the "mesmeric," in Frank Norris's panic novel The Pit. I show how Norris drew upon the clinical study of hypnotism, hysteria, and subconscious selves to make sense of the behavior of the market during financial panics. I elaborate how Norris uses the New Psychology to study how turn-of-the-century market pressures threaten the sufficiency of the artist. Chapter 5 studies how Mark Twain considered financial panic an enabling condition of realist writing and authorship. Focusing on "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," I analyze how Twain performed his own financial redemption in the marketplace after the panic of 1893. A coda presents a reading of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby that explicates the relation between commercial catastrophe, elegy, and the failure of commodities and poetic symbols to deliver their promised significance.