Regionalism, modernism, and the American short story cycle

The short story cycle---a collection of independent and interrelated stories---has become an increasingly popular form, a staple in the diet of contemporary literature and film. The prevalence of the cycle today provides incentive for looking back at the rise of this genre in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. This project takes up that challenge, and examines this critically neglected genre to reveal unexplored connections between regionalism, often considered a nineteenth-century phenomenon, and modernism, frequently hailed for its urban bent. This dissertation looks beyond the popular misconception that the genre is a simple compromise, between authors and publishers or between the novel and the short story collection. Instead, I will demonstrate, the short story cycle mobilizes its unique, fragmented form to reconceive regional spaces disrupted themselves by forces of modernization and standardization. Unlike earlier regionalists who tend to depict rural communities nostalgically as a site of origins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Langston Hughes create what Astradur Eysteinsson has called a modernist "aesthetics of interruption." They employ the cycle's formal peculiarities to interrupt inherited ideas about regional and racial types, the relationship between the observable landscape and the fictional text, and the status of regional identities. Accounting for the circulation of mass culture in the early-twentieth century is integral to understanding these texts, which often pose a challenge to the notion of a so-called great divide. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and Hughes's Simple volumes parody novel reading, refusing to conform to the demands of publishers for unity and uniformity. Stein's Three Lives upends the conventions of earlier realism and of popular local color sketches to subvert stereotypes. Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Hemingway's In Our Time critique versions of the Midwest offered up by mainstream journalism. And Faulkner's The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses resist Hollywood's formulaic South. This genre proves to be a valuable lens through which to re-examine crucial and overlooked ties between regionalism and modernism.