| This dissertation scrutinizes the constructions of ethnic, racial, sexual, and criminal underworlds in American culture and literature of the modern and postmodern periods. The underworld, I contend, is a shifting and unstable metaphor, one that designates newly produced social formations that are created through the concatenation of social and spatial marginality. I argue that the underworld in American literature should be understood as an effect of forces that are transacted at the macroeconomic level at which capitalism has historically evolved and through its logic of uneven development has left its mark on the city's changing spatiality and at the discursive level where criminal anthropology, theories of degeneration, Chicago School sociology, urban planning, and post-WWII theories of racial pathology formulate and theorize the underworld. A close interrogation of the underworld's representation in American literature reveals, I show, the ways in which narrative and genre are reshaped by an engagement with this discursively produced, real-and-imagined population, living in a condensed, and often literally subterranean, sphere. Which populations are considered underworld changes, I argue, over the twentieth century, as an expression of emerging cultural anxieties about crime, class, sex, disease, race, social justice, and the city. In the twentieth-century American novel, the underworld is a contested realm constructed socio-historically and linguistically, a domain where historical exclusions and law both (de)form bodies and produce new possibilities for human solidarity, pleasure, and survival in the 'lower' terrains of the urban. Focusing on works by Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and Don DeLillo, I contend that these writers deploy new narratological strategies that map the marginalized social spaces of this purportedly lurid and libidinal realm in ways that test and reproduce the unequal social relations that create spatial unevenness. This dissertation discloses how the underworld has changed historically, how narratives from James to DeLillo represent its changing character, and how these changes are tied to the upper stratum's imposed spatializations. |
