Versions of pastoral in modern American fiction (Frank Norris, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Henry Roth)

This dissertation examines the importance of pastoral convention in the development of American modernism, focusing on works by Frank Norris, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Henry Roth. Drawing on definitions of pastoral by Leo Marx and William Empson, I argue that the primary benefit of pastoral style is that it allowed these authors to express their ambivalence towards modernity. For all the works under discussion, pressures of social change are represented by a transformed relationship to landscape, a relationship that also implies drastic historical changes in the definition of Americanness during the first half of the twentieth century.; Chapter One describes Norris's shifts between satirizing, qualifying, and engaging the mythic resonances of pastoral, from McTeague to The Octopus to The Pit, and demonstrates how Norris's treatment of ethnic relations expresses his ambivalent endorsement of westward expansionism, as well as his desire to transcend contemporary cultural frontiers. In his self-conscious treatment of pastoral convention, Norris emerges as an early modernist as much as a naturalist, centrally concerned with the validity of artistic representation and prospects for individuality in modern society. Chapter Two examines Cather's ironic representations of pastoral nostalgia, detecting a growing skepticism toward the pastoral in her early career, from The Song of the Lark to My Antonia to A Lost Lady. I suggest that while Cather remains sympathetic to the escapist motivations of pastoral, she nevertheless criticizes pastoral, showing it to be ahistorical and sentimental. Chapter Three argues that Faulkner embeds a modernist critique of the pastoral in representations of landscape in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, locating in Keats's idea of the "Cold Pastoral" a resistance to the arrest of time, and adapting stylistic influences from T. S. Eliot to reflect upon the decay of pastoral landscape. The concluding chapter shows how pastoral nostalgia in Roth's Call It Sleep demonstrates Roth's encounter with Hart Crane's modernism, and expresses the effort to sustain a coherent sense of ethnic continuity in the context of an increasingly cosmopolitan, diverse, urban environment.