| This dissertation provides a conceptual framework within which to understand textual interactions with morality and space in New York City from 1850 to 1930. Representations of the slums in fiction and documentary writing from the antebellum period to the 1920s transform from cynical narratives of urban dissipation to lyrical promotions of a cultural "Renaissance." Narratives that take place in neighborhoods characterized by cultural marginalization such as the East Side waterfront district, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "black Bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side, and Harlem, cannot be reduced to either vehicles for middle-class values or purely subversive expressions of radical or transnational democracy. Writers "slumming" in Manhattan were attempting to inform their audiences of the benefits and shortcomings of cosmopolitan urban life by textualizing the effects of marginal urban areas on New York society as a whole. The slums were initially blamed for shaking the moral foundations of New York's "respectable" citizenry; but by the turn of the twentieth century, they were celebrated for enriching the psychological and cultural attributes of intrepidly individualistic wanderers. |
