FROM THE HINTERLANDS: MODERNISM AND REGIONALISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1918-1941
Open Access
- Author:
- Gatzemeyer, Jace Patrick
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 24, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Sean X Goudie, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Sean X Goudie, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Janet Wynne Lyon, Committee Member
Robert L. Caserio, Committee Member
Daniel L Letwin, Outside Member - Keywords:
- modernism
regionalism
american literature
american modernism
literary regionalism
new regionalism - Abstract:
- From the Hinterlands: Modernism and Regionalism in American Literature, 1918-1941 argues for renewed attention to American modernist writing that negotiates spatial attachment through the sub-national scale of the region. While literary critics thus far have characterized American regionalist writing as an attempt to either unify or fracture national community, I show that a number of American modernist writers employed a regionalist approach to critique, reimagine, and reinvigorate modern American culture and as a strategy to envision community outside the artificial structures of the sovereign nation-state and the modern metropolis. Considering “modernist regionalism” less as a generic category or a set of ideals and attitudes than as a discourse, a discrete strategy for negotiating, resisting, or reinforcing meanings about particular sub-national places and their inhabitants, I argue that a diverse and diffuse group of modernist writers used regionalism as a framework for rethinking the modern era’s relationship with the past and for restoring a sense of place and community to the peripatetic and deracinated conditions of twentieth-century life. Despite the New Modernist Studies’ “transnational turn,” which has productively opened up modernist literature and culture to diverse locations, movements, and networks beyond the Euro-American metropolitan axis, scholars have been slow to address the modernism of early twentieth-century American regionalism. Because modernism is so intimately connected with the urban space, modernist critics have customarily minoritized regional writing either by characterizing it as a residual form of nostalgic nineteenth-century “local color” or by relegating regionalists to discrete geographically-bounded categories. My intervention involves rethinking regionalism as neither a unifying literary tourism nor a heroic resistance to American imperialism; rather, for some American modernist writers, “the region” constituted an alternative to the communal scales of the nation-state and of the metropolis, a substitute for nationalism’s “imagined community” and urbanism’s “blasé outlook.”