Mapping the 'inland empire:' American literature, criticism, and the problem of culture, 1915--1941

The focus of this dissertation is the debate over culture in American literature, criticism and literary history during the years 1915–1941. I trace how American writers and critics engaged, along with anthropologists, social scientist and intellectuals, in a debate over culture and value that produce on the one hand theories of literary and poetic value, and on the other, theories of national, racial, and regional identity. I argue that culture in this period constitutes a problematic—an orienting cluster of unresolved problems—that structure both anthropological and literary debates, and involve figures from both disciplines (and others) in a common conversation over a common problem. These debates, and the tensions they contain—between the normative and the analytical, universalism and pluralism, the relation of part to whole, objectivity and imaginative identification—make a wide variety of positions available to the American critics, social scientists and artists seeking to redefine (or resist) an “American” national identity or aesthetic. Attention to these competing versions of culture, moreover, are crucial to understanding the development of such apparently politically and aesthetically opposite phenomena as the institutionalization of American literature and American Studies, regionalism, and the rise of the New Criticism. I trace this problematic through the work of anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, and literary and social critic Van Wyck Brooks; Willa Cather's writings on Indian art and artifacts in The Song of the Lark and The Professor's House; key texts of the Melville revival of the 1920's, such as Raymond Weaver's Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, Van Wyck Brooks's articles in “A Reviewer's Notebook,” and Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville; the enthographic innovations of Bronislaw Malinowski; and in the emergent New Critical theories of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate.