Different dispatches: Journalism in American modernist prose (Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Robert Penn Warren)

This dissertation examines how a group of influential American modernist writers from the inter-war period incorporated aspects of journalism into literary works that address pressing issues of culture and community. In going beyond strictly stylistic or biographical considerations, this dissertation describes how writers such as Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, and Robert Penn Warren incorporate references to journalism in their literary works, and it examines how these writers engage journalism's implicit appeal to a common ground as a means of imagining national communities and addressing pressing social concerns. In considering the reading practices of the time and the complex significance of journalism within networks of writing and communication, this study draws upon such theorists as Benedict Anderson, Pierre Bourdieu, Jurgen Habermas, Raymond Williams, and Slavoj Zizek.; As journalism became the basis for an expanding mass media, increasingly sophisticated groups of readers and critics, largely associated with the rise of influential small magazines and academic criticism, began to distinguish "high" from "low" culture, and writers became more aware of the professional aspects of their craft and careers. Though the mass appeal of the newspaper would seem to run counter to the avant-garde experiments of modernism, this dissertation demonstrates how writers incorporate references to journalism in order to shape innovative works from accessible references and language. In this way, these writers mediate the demands of both sophisticated and popular audiences, examine expectations about objectivity and truth, and challenge conventional expectations about existing narrative strategies and genres. In developing these arguments, this dissertation refocuses debates about the defining features of American modernism in terms of both its stylistic and structural qualities and its dialogic engagement with contemporary social conditions and mass culture.