Clearing out: Escape genres and American culture, 1880-1915
Wagner, Vivian Audrey
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/23749
Description
Title
Clearing out: Escape genres and American culture, 1880-1915
Author(s)
Wagner, Vivian Audrey
Issue Date
1996
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Parker, Robert D.
Department of Study
American Studies
Literature, American
Discipline
American Studies
Literature, American
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
American Studies
Literature, American
Language
eng
Abstract
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.
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