Novel work: Theater and journalism in the writing of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather

This dissertation asks how Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather imagined the novel in the context of the theater and journalism industries at the turn of the century. Its first chapter analyzes the relation between Dreiser's Sister Carrie and his newspaper apprenticeship, and asks why Dreiser left the business of writing outside his novel of work. This chapter argues that the form of Sister Carrie bears the evidence of Dreiser's effort to capture the changing shape of the novel's world and shift the novel into relation with the newspaper and theater industries.;The second chapter takes as its subject the relation between narrative and theatrical techniques in Wharton's The House of Mirth and grounds its examination of story telling and role-playing in the novel's historical situation. In the fall of 1905, as the final pages of The House of Mirth were appearing in Scribner's, George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession opened and closed, first in New Haven and then in New York. This chapter argues that Wharton's novel includes an anti-theatrical prejudice tied to her aspirations for the novel as a form of cultural work.;The final chapter turns to Cather's early career in journalism and her novel of artistic awakening, The Song of the Lark, to argue that Cather imagined Thea Kronborg's operatic career in terms shaped by Cather's experiences as a journalist. This argument does not follow Cather's own desire to separate her aesthetic ideas from her commercial apprenticeship, but instead situates Cather's ideas about art in a context shaped by her early journalism. The question this chapter poses also animates the project as a whole, how might a novel be both an aesthetic experience and a commercial artifact at the same time? The title, Novel Work, highlights this conundrum, and this dissertation argues that part of the novel's work as an artistic form is to imagine its own situation in both cultural and commercial terms. By working to recover the conditions in which Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather wrote this dissertation aims further to specify the nature of their creative achievements.