| This dissertation is a consideration of the nationalist priorities that underwrote much of American literature in the nineteen twenties. It is based upon a historical argument that the twenties were the moment of consolidation, digestion, and, to some extent culmination, of the diverse 'nationalizing' trends of the past several decades. These changes produced not only the virulent and paranoid nationalist projects associated with the twenties (nativism, most prominently) but also a range of literary investigations of the meaning of national life and the relationship of literature to it.; My approach to this subject is organized by two distinct interpretive goals that run through each of the chapters: first, to provide a historical account of the evolution of literary nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This account moves from the republican period to the emergence of liberal society and liberal literary culture (via a reading of Emerson), and then to the standard chronology of literary form that the cultural parameters of liberalism made possible (American Renaissance, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism). I emphasize not the aesthetic priorities of each of those moments per se (which are, in any event, already well understood), so much as the distinct assumptions about the possibilities of representing and, in some cases, redeeming national life that these aesthetic projects implied.; The second interpretive goal is my attempt to chart the major currents of literary nationalism in the nineteen twenties. Towards this end, I focus on three writers: William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, and William Faulkner, who provide the opportunity to consider, respectively, modernist investments in redemptive nationalism and cultural originality, the persistence of realist nationalist ambitions and their distortion in Dreiser's late naturalism, and Faulkner's belated turn towards literary nationalism, after the cultural circumstances that had legitimized it had disappeared. |
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