Revolting whiteness: Race, class, and the American grotesque

The pages of any anthology of American literature are crowded with poor whites, from Mark Twain's Huck Finn to William Faulkner's Snopeses, from the antiheroes of Southwestern humor to the dialect speakers of local color. Yet poor whiteness has not been addressed as a central formal and thematic impetus for U.S. literature. This is in part because the field of literary studies lacks an analytical apparatus for addressing these figures, who fall between hegemonic whiteness and racialized poverty. As a result, poor whites are read out of American literature: viewed either as universal figures or, when their presence is clearly a problem in a text, as stand-ins for immigrants, Native Americans, or other populations more commonly targeted by xenophobic anxiety. My dissertation responds to this literary-critical blind spot by identifying the grotesque as a politically salient aesthetic form---as a tool with which authors broach questions of art and society, literature and culture, form and content---and using this insight to address the stylistic and thematic effects of representing poor whiteness.;Revolting Whiteness reveals that poor whites have a considerable textual presence in American literature and a substantial textual effect: formal innovations are pioneered in response to the challenge of representing poor whites' social location. I thus deem this whiteness "revolting," for poor whites are both disgusting---in their flouting of social and corporeal norms, in their paradoxical amalgam of unwieldy excess and of lack---and in rebellion: they mutiny in the works of Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor, instigating adaptations of established literary genres and narrative forms and thereby transforming the American literary tradition.