Reading the middle: US women novelists and print culture, 1930-1960

Vigiletti, Elyse R

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Description

Title

Reading the middle: US women novelists and print culture, 1930-1960

Author(s)

Vigiletti, Elyse R

Issue Date

2016-04-22

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Foote, Stephanie

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Foote, Stephanie

Committee Member(s)

• Hutner, Gordon
• Somerville, Siobhan
• Underwood, William T
• Bauer, Dale

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Print culture
• Novel
• Women Writers
• Feminism
• Digital Humanities
• Twentieth-Century Literature
• American Studies
• American Literature
• Edna Ferber
• Patricia Highsmith
• Ann Petry
• Lillian Smith
• Jessie Fauset
• Genre Fiction
• Crime Fiction

Abstract

"""Reading the Middle: US Women Novelists and Print Culture, 1930-1960"" is about feminist protest as a core value of the American bourgeoisie, bringing gender studies, digital humanities, and American literature and print culture together in analyses of a collection of thirty-plus novels of mid-twentieth-century women writers. In it, I argue that the women writers of mainstream fiction in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s summoned carefully circumscribed deployments of critical paradigms such as feminism, antiracism, and anticapitalism to allow their American middle-class audience to elevate their leisure reading to a passively productive exercise in intellectual stimulation. In so doing, these writers helped establish and refine a uniquely twentieth-century phase of American progressivism that persisted long past their individual novels' fame."

Graduation Semester

2016-05

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90868

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2016 Elyse Vigiletti

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