Clearing out: Escape genres and American culture, 1880-1915

Imaginary worlds proliferated in turn-of-the-century American literature and culture, including the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Boston in 2000, Mars, Oz, and the West. Focusing on utopian, fantasy, and western writings, this project theorizes the white middle-class desire both to domesticate and to escape that inspired the creation of these phantasmic tourist destinations; the worlds created by these genres dialectically engage discourses of sentimental domesticity on the one hand, and discourses of authoritarian imperialism on the other. Although critics usually examine such genres as separate cultural formations, I argue in this project that turn-of-the-century utopias, fantasy novels, and westerns inform and define each other, imagining an escape from what their often white middle-class writers perceived as an increasingly urban and chaotic American democracy.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

American Studies

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Wagner, Vivian Audrey

Contributors dc:contributor

• Parker, Robert D.

• American Studies
• Literature, American

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1996 Wagner, Vivian Audrey

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

9780591199550
AAI9712473
(UMI)AAI9712473

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/23749