Spectacular narratives: Stephen Crane, ideology, popular culture

Despite Crane's great interest in significant social themes of his time, very few critics have tried to analyze his work from a social as well as a literary perspective. My study, on the contrary, tries to show that only an analysis capable of grasping the politics of Crane's texts can adequately account for their stylistic and aesthetic qualities. In fact the latter should be seen as ideological maneuvers in their own right--as a stylistic machinery through which the texts map, repress, and find imaginary solutions to the social and political anxieties they themselves evoke.; Crane's literary career can be outlined in some sense as a continuous struggle to mark a difference between his work and popular literature. Yet, in Chapter I, I also analyze the way in which Crane's spectacular rhetoric may overlap with the desire for thrilling spectacles that characterized the embryonic consumer society of the day. Later in the thesis, by proposing new readings of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Chapter II) and The Red Badge of Courage (Chapter V) against the background of popular genres of the day (discussed in Chapters II and V) I explore the writer's attempt to differentiate his own productions from those of the culture industry. However, I also argue that Crane's texts embody and yet contain and manipulate social anxieties to the extent that what appears initially to be a critique of certain social realities falls prey to ideologies that are neither politically subversive nor always more enlightening than the ones he castigates in popular culture.