Constructing urban experience: American realism, the periodical press, and the late-nineteenth-century cityscape

This study situates urban realism in contests over the meaning and uses of American urban space in the late nineteenth century. Three innovations of the late nineteenth-century urban landscape---mass transit systems, apartment buildings, and public parks---appear repeatedly in the period's fiction and journalism to figure concerns about the impact of urbanization on individual and social identity. In journal articles and literary works such as The Bostonians (1885), A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), Sister Carrie (1900), and The House of Mirth (1905), these structures serve as crucial sites for imagining modern subjectivity. I argue that realists use these urban forms not merely to critique prevailing social conditions, but to expose the insufficiency of progressive reform efforts intended to remedy these conditions.; Chapter One details the links between turn-of-the-century journalism, reform literature, and realist fiction, all of which emphasize the role played by physical environments in the creation of citizens. Chapter Two considers how fictional and journalistic treatments of urban transit highlight correlations between physical, economic and social power and indicate the simultaneously liberating and restrictive nature of technological progress and city growth. Chapter Three argues that the interdependence of homes in apartment buildings manifests physically the interdependence of modern social relations; representations of apartments and apartment buildings use these new domestic spaces to examine changing understandings of family, gender roles, and class expectations when the home no longer functions as a psychological haven from the capitalist marketplace. Chapter Four focuses on urban public parks constructed in cities around the country at the end of the nineteenth century. Though promoters used the periodical press to tout parks as antidotes to the stresses of the city, several contemporary novels and stories employ public parks---artificial spaces of "nature"---to expose the pervasiveness of equally unnatural social conventions.; Much realist fiction employing these emblematic urban spaces appeared serially in magazines alongside articles about developing American urban centers. By bringing together both the physical and publication contexts of realist fiction, this study offers a new reading of realism as embedded in debates about the relationship between urban environments and civil society.