| My dissertation examines the construction of “Bohemia” in American literature and culture. Mobile and shape-shifting, la vie bohème traveled from the Parisian Latin Quarter to the U.S. in 1858. First the province of small artistic coteries, Bohemia soon inspired a popular vogue, embodying itself anew in restaurants, clubs, neighborhoods, novels, poems, paintings, and periodicals. By the 1890's, the recitation piece “I'd rather live in Bohemia than any other land” had permeated even the most decorous of bourgeois drawing-rooms. Part literary trope, cultural nexus, and socio-economic landscape, the semi-fictive topography of Bohemia proved remarkably adaptable. My dissertation develops a model for understanding how each Bohemia reinterpreted la vie bohème and why this romance became a lasting cultural phenomenon.; Often rhetorically positioned as a separate nation, “Bohemia” negotiated between diverse cultural formations, both within and without the United States. Seeking to enlarge and complicate the familiar dichotomy between the Bohemian and the Bourgeois, I argue that la vie bohème reconfigured a wide range of social conflicts, including tensions between nativist movements and ethnic cultures, regional/national and cosmopolitan identities, public and private spheres, work and play, “New Women” and “New Men,” the aesthetic and the commercial, and art and life. Guided by these shifting, overlapping, and ever-dialectical oppositions, my dissertation draws on original archival research and new readings of canonical texts. Ranging from The American Scene to The Fort Worth Bohemian, I focus on Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, James Weldon Johnson, Abraham Cahan, and Henry James. I trace each of these writer's textual engagements with La Bohème , locating them within a dense matrix of historical events, literary movements, and (counter)cultural communities. From “Bohemian Walks and Talks,” Harte's weekly column in The Golden Era (1859–1863), to the “Black Bohemia” of Mid-town Manhattan and The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man, the labile geography of Bohemia transposes many of our writers' most insistent preoccupations and develops oppositional perspectives. Always straining against and implicated within dominant ideologies of race, class, gender, and nationality, American Bohemias provide integral standpoints from which to rethink the development of U.S. literature and culture. |
