'I'll never be hungry again': Sectionalism, economic resistance, and the trope of the Civil War in American fiction, 1894--2010

This dissertation examines the use of the Civil War in the work of American novelists seeking to challenge the economic structure of the United States. Presenting geographic regions as spatial representations of temporal phases of capitalist development, these novelists turn the Civil War into a narrative of sectional agrarian resistance to a national program of modem economic integration; they suggest the possibility of preserving a modernist form of resistance to global capital within the spatial and temporal assumptions of late capitalism. Chapter One explores Mark Twain's restaging of the Civil War as a conflict between the United States' democratic potential and the inequalities produced by speculation. Chapter Two investigates the Agrarians' formulation of a response to the Great Depression favoring subsistence agriculture over industrial development. Building on Twain's anti-speculative reading of the war, Agrarian Civil War novels such as Stark Young's So Red the Rose and Allen Tate's The Fathers depict the War as the South's entry into capitalist modernity and initiate a narrative of regional resistance to the national economy. Margaret Mitchell presents the Agrarians' vision of the South as a geographic utopia that offers Southerners a refuge from capitalist modernity. Chapter Three examines how John Steinbeck draws on the Agrarian vision of the Civil War to posit a distinctly progressive Southern solution to the Great Depression. Chapter Four demonstrates how Robert Penn Warren's Wilderness and Margaret Walker's Jubilee develop the progressive potential of Agrarian resistance to capital by recalling the context of the Civil War to unpack the conflation of freedom with capitalism in Cold War America. Chapter Five traces the way postmodern novels such as E.L. Doctorow's The March, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain look to the Civil War as a moment in which regional economies could provide an alternative to the totality of late capitalism---a desire for what I term "the lost geography of narrative potential." I conclude with a reconsideration of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!---a text offering a spatial description of economic development while retaining a coherent historical narrative that provides a model to challenge the presumptions of late capitalism.