The Specter of Art in the American Business Novel: 1885-1917
Item
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Title
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The Specter of Art in the American Business Novel: 1885-1917
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:28e1c02dd662:11564
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identifier
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12088
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Creator
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Schiebe, Mark,
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Contributor
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Morris Dickstein
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | American studies | Modern history | Abraham Cahan | Businessmen in literature | Frank Norris | Mark Twain | Theodore Dreiser
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Abstract
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This dissertation is an examination of the interconnection between aesthetics and business practice as it is imagined in the work of American novelists during the final decade and a half of the nineteenth century and the first decade and a half of the twentieth. Through a reading of novels about businessmen composed during the years when "men of commerce" first received wide fictional representation, The Specter of Art in the American Business Novel explores the network of values connoted by the terms "business" and "art," and finds a secretly shared vocabulary existing alongside the recognized antagonisms between activities commonly thought to comprise opposing poles of cultural heroism. Appropriating as a structuring allegory the fateful encounter between the expatriate artist and his ghostly "American" businessman double in Henry James's "The Jolly Corner," I argue that novelists such as Mark Twain, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Abraham Cahan perform acts of self-analysis, even exorcism, through the imaginative creation of what cultural historian Henry Nash Smith called the "capitalist hero.".;In this study, I draw on fin de siecle debates about the gold standard, the role of the immigrant in shaping capital/labor relations, and the tie between American "masculinity" and the (vanishing) western frontier; I re-assess powerful contemporary statements such as Thorstein Veblen's theory of the businessman as a parasite of production and Andrew Carnegie's apology for the capitalist "superman" on Darwinian grounds; and I argue for an emerging parallel between literary and financial practices in an era when the "speculative economy," one dominated by the manipulation of representations of land, natural resources, and the products of industry, eclipsed an older model based on production as an end in itself.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
