Incognitos: Modern Slumming Narratives and the Unmaking of Sexual Identity

"Though the slumming narrative is a minor literary genre that typically uncovers and classifies urban racial-ethnic and sexual ""perversions,"" ""Incognitos"" contends that some sexually suspect early-twentieth-century writers---white and Black---manipulated its form to avoid sexual exposure and to challenge developing constructions of sexuality in modern America. Through divergent styles, Progressive-era realists such as Jane Addams and Willa Cather, Afro-Modernist bohemians like Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent, and transatlantic Anglo-American Modernists such as Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes renovate a genre traditionally dedicated to sexual surveillance and categorization. Together these writers question the value of an identifiable homosexual identity and subculture while they simultaneously confirm and interrogate developing racial-ethnic identities, thereby illuminating how a minor genre has significant cultural ramifications for developing notions of visibility and invisibility in modern U.S. literary public spheres."

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Herring, Terrell Scott

Contributors dc:contributor

• Tim Dean

• American Studies

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3130934

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81401