Critical mass: Negotiations of mass culture in American novels, 1885-1945

An emergent mass culture preoccupied a number of American novelists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Serious writers thought deeply about various phenomena associated with mass culture--the breakdown of privacy, the cult of celebrity, the commercialization of art--and represented them as subject matter in their work. At the same time, these writers drew on discourses such as advertising, gossip columns, mass-market magazines, and movies by imitating or incorporating them into their aesthetic practices. My project revises previous accounts of literature in this period by showing that American authors, however ambivalent they were toward mass culture, nonetheless engaged in a dialogue with the newly dominant mass media. This dialogue allowed them to produce an immanent critique of modern commercial culture.;The first chapter examines a dialectic between privacy and publicity in Henry James's novels that links him to contemporary observers who worried that privacy was being eroded by newspapers and photography. Chapter 2 places Edith Wharton's early novels in the context of a new cult of celebrity engendered by gossip columns. She came to understand that female agency, and by extension her own creation of an authorial image, derived in part from the purposeful manipulation of an erotics of publicity. Chapter 3 charts the ways in which John Dos Passos mediates mass culture in his U.S.A. trilogy (1930-1936) by transcribing advertisements and headlines directly into the narrative, yet providing cues that train readers how to reflect critically on these texts. I argue in Chapter 4 that Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) redefine success as celebrity and disclose how celebrity preoccupies the movies and newspapers that condition their impressionable consumers. F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance on popular magazines and Hollywood studios has generally been viewed as a financial necessity that enervates his novels. Against this view, Chapter 5 argues that the culture industry pervades the very subject matter that founds his satirical project. My sixth chapter demonstrates that Nathanael West uses advice columns and cinematic techniques to develop a cultural critique within American literary modernism.