%0 PDF %T Frontier Modernisms: Form, Race, and Rupture in 1920s Novels. %A VanderVeen, Jeffrey. %8 2017-04-24 %R http://localhost/files/dv140593t %X Abstract: Frontier Modernisms: Form, Race and Rupture in 1920s Novels Working toward a definition of American modernism that recognizes the necessity of including Asian American, Native American, and noncanonical African American texts for understanding the full range of subjectivities that create and are created by the modernist moment in America--the years between the World Wars, but especially the decade of the 1920s--my dissertation argues that American modernism emerged at an overdetermined, ruptural moment in U.S. history when racial tensions transformed the national identity and subjugated citizens represented their lived experiences in fiction. Current definitions of modernism, I show, therefore must be revised to position the American frontier as a central, contested site where writers voice differing perspectives on imperialism, community, and heterogeneity. Chapter One outlines the history of the period and various materialist approaches to the field of modernism. Chapter Two posits Mourning Dove's Cogewea (1927) as a modernist text that struggles with contradictions brought on in missionary boarding schools and finds resolution in a return to Okanogan tradition. Chapter Three shows the ways in which Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter(1930) grapples with the concept of primitivism, using African American sounds to disrupt white power structures. Chapter Four explores Willa Cather's The Professor's House's(1925) reaction to changing racial dynamics on the American frontier and reliance on a mythical connection between white American identity and an indigenous past. Chapter Five argues that Winifred Eaton's Cattle(1924) envisions a utopian, heterogeneous space outside of the dominant culture and the constricting social construction of race, creating a fictional vantage point from which to criticize United States' imperialism. These four novels offer a view of modernism more diverse than traditional readings of the field and call for a re-envisioning of modernism as an early twentieth-century literary movement that expresses in a wide variety of forms--sometimes detached and experimental, at other times revisionist and appropriative--the struggle to resolve the contradictions that determine them. To understand those resolutions and their contradictions, I emphasize, it is paramount that we take a materialist approach and consider each text in its historical specificity.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2013.; Submitted to the Dept. of English.; Advisors: Elizabeth Ammons, and Modhumita Roy.; Committee: Emilio Sauri, and Ichiro Takayoshi.; Keywords: American literature, and Literature. %[ 2022-10-11 %9 Text %~ Tufts Digital Library %W Institution