| This dissertation examines the role that U.S. literature played between 1880 and the start of World War II in challenging and rethinking free market ideology. The post-Civil War period saw ever larger businesses and cooperatives begin to dominate the U.S. economy, while economic depressions and frequent labor strikes shook people's faith in the free market system. By the late nineteenth century these problems had led to a rich and vital debate over America's economic future, a debate that played out not only in politics and judicial proceedings but in social and cultural milieus as well. While most research on literature and economics during this period has concentrated on the expression of revolutionary and socialist ideology, this dissertation examines those writers whose views were reformist, rather than revolutionary. In so doing, it argues that the Progressive Era and the Great Depression were historical periods in which liberalism turned inward, confronting and attempting to solve the problems inherent in its orthodoxy. The texts examined cover a range of literary fields, including late nineteenth-century utopian fiction (Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and some novelistic responses to it), naturalism (the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser), and modernism (John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy in particular). In analyzing these texts, this dissertation draws connections between literary works often separated by disciplinary boundaries, demonstrating their responses to the shared exigency of economic crisis. |
