The legitimation of inequality: The rise of culture and the making of character in American literature, 1870--1915

In "The Legitimation of Inequality: The Rise of Culture and the Making of Class in American Literature, 1870-1915," I examine the many ways in which America tried to reconcile its commitment to individualism with the fact of economic inequality in the period following the Civil War to WWI.; The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first I examine how America came to accept the inevitability of economic inequalities. Here I look at how culture---specifically literature---was positioned as the remedy for the class tensions that Walt Whitman and others identified as the primary threat to the American nation. In the second chapter I examine Henry James's The Bostonians in order to demonstrate how the novel redefines the American middle class such that everyone can claim to be a part of it. By making cultural rather than economic capital the basis for entry into the middle-class, James shows us, I argue, how it is possible for everyone to claim a middle-class identity regardless of their economic situation.; Owen Wister sought to redefine the American class system not by enlarging the middle class but by redefining class in such a way that everyone could already claim to be possess it. By making class an issue of "quality," Wister's enormously successful novel, The Virginian, sought not simply to subdue class tensions, I argue, but to transform how we have think about merit as a public good. In the final chapter, I examine how cultural critics like Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne changed the terms of the debate about equality in America such that cultural rather than economic inequality became the focus of discussion. Tracking the issues of difference and economic inequality through the literary histories of America written in the late nineteenth century, I show how Kallen and Bourne pushed aside what had been an ongoing interest in economic equality in order to make cultural equality the nation's central preoccupation.