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    Consuming Communities: U.S. Women's Regionalism and Consumer Culture, 1870-1930

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    Tigchelaar_ku_0099D_13340_DATA_1.pdf (1.111Mb)
    Issue Date
    2014-05-31
    Author
    Tigchelaar, Jana Michelle
    Publisher
    University of Kansas
    Format
    240 pages
    Type
    Dissertation
    Degree Level
    Ph.D.
    Discipline
    English
    Rights
    Copyright held by the author.
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    Abstract
    Literary regionalism has always faced critical devaluation, both at the time of its greatest popularity in the late nineteenth century and during its critical rediscovery in the past twenty years. Even those critics who seek to laud regionalist texts for offering alternatives to dominant national narratives assume that regionalism is removed from centers of power and authority and not involved in the creation of national identity. Regional literature's peripheral communities, inhabitants, and localized lives were seen as somehow more authentically American than urban scenes and city dwellers, but paradoxically regionalism's purported authenticity also doomed the genre in the face of the rising changes brought by modernity and literary modernism. My dissertation argues that regional literature by American women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not only a product of the expanding consumer culture, but was also fundamentally engaged with this culture, using consumer goods to attempt to define and control the communities they depict. This claim challenges concepts of regionalist literature as a marginal generic category as well as traditional beliefs about the consumer economy's destructive impact on regional community identities. Through my examination of texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, and Willa Cather, I challenge prevailing notions of regional literature's marginal status. In these texts, individuals consume to both validate their sense of community and attempt to realize their ambitions for social mobility. In doing so, regionalist authors use consumer objects and material exchange to reimagine communities that transgress the presumably fixed margins of the local to promote fluid, permeable notions of modernity and national identity.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/1808/22523
    Collections
    • Dissertations [4475]
    • English Dissertations and Theses [449]

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    Contact KU ScholarWorks
    785-864-8983
    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    785-864-8983

    KU Libraries
    1425 Jayhawk Blvd
    Lawrence, KS 66045
    Image Credits
     

     

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