THE POWER OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE: NARRATING THE PAST IN HAWTHORNE, JAMES, AND DREISER (AMERICAN NOVELS, NINETEENTH CENTURY, MASSACHUSETTS, INDIANA, POLITICS)

This dissertation combines theoretical and historical methods to study portrayals of characters and narrators reconstructing the past in The House of the Seven Gables, The Bostonians, The Wings of the Dove, and An American Tragedy. Within the act of historical narration, in portraits of characters and narrators attempting to reshape their own and their community's past, struggles for personal identity and political power are waged. The dissertation demonstrates that an awareness of the impulse to flee or defuse historical experience is built into American narratives themselves. If American narrators and characters aspire to the condition of transcendence, they nevertheless keep looking nervously back over their shoulders toward the confinements of the historical past and present inscribed in their texts.;The study begins with a theoretical introduction which traces a developing set of critical assumptions about time and history in American novels, at the same time that it draws upon some of these approaches to derive a method for exploring the representation of historical consciousness in novels by Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser. Such theorists as Barthes on the ahistorical impulse of middle-class myth; Jameson on modernist attempts to "manage" history; and Hayden White on the relativism of historical interpretation are used to discuss how historical narration can itself be seen as an instrument for defusing social conflict and political polarization. Chapter two turns to primary and secondary sources on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historiography, to explore the American obsession with retelling the past in the periods roughly contemporaneous with the literary works under consideration. This view of theories of history writing from the mid-nineteenth-century to the opening decades of the twentieth, enters into dialogue with ideas about historical narration found in the novels read in later chapters. The dissertation ultimately suggests a growing awareness both of the relativism of historical knowledge and of the alignment of political power and the powers of historical interpretation, from Hawthorne to Dreiser.