Exposing the modern: World's Fairs and American literary culture, 1853--1907
Abstract
This dissertation establishes relationships between American realism, modernism, and material culture by exploring intersections between international expositions and literature from 1853 through 1907. Focusing on three American writers who studied world's fairs--Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Henry Adams--it argues that expositions circulated new forms of representation that American literature both imitated and resisted. World's fairs offered an unprecedented space where the idea of America and the idea of modernity coalesced in material objects on display. American writers with realist leanings sought literary equivalents for the "embodied ideas," lines of vision, and spatial overviews expositions showcased. An introduction, "The Machine in the Palace," argues that associations between Union, exposition, and invention during the 1850s informed Abraham Lincoln's definition of slavery and Union as a rival inventions. Whitman, Howells, and Adams followed Lincoln in reconstituting the nation's founding principles from spectacles of technological, corporate, and federal power. Chapter One, "Whitman's Passagen-Werk: Leaves of Grass and the New York Crystal Palace," contends that Whitman's visits to the first American world's fair provided the terms for a poetic self extended across space and time; while Chapter Two, " thinspace'After All, Not to Create Only': Whitman, Exposition, and Reconstruction Poetics," traces the deference of that self to the overpowering exposition culture of the Gilded Age, yielding a more modern, fragmented vision. The third chapter, "Realism and Hyperreality: Howells, World's Fairs, and the Problem of Narrative," locates the unstable realist framework of The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes in Howells's early review of the Philadelphia Centennial, and documents the transformation of that framework into his "Altrurian" reading of the Chicago Columbian Exposition as socialist utopia. In Chapter Four, " thinspace'Interchangeable Attractions': Henry Adams, World's Fairs, and the Architecture of Empire," Adams's "manikin," professing (contra Whitman) to contain nothing, tailors an Education around expositions that register a felt relationship between the body and "supersensual" forces of history and international relations. By reading their works in terms of exposition culture, this study foregrounds these writers' literary inconsistencies, mixed political allegiances, and emerging, if reluctant, modernism. ^
Subject Area
American Studies|Art History|Literature, American
Recommended Citation
Joseph Claude Murphy,
"Exposing the modern: World's Fairs and American literary culture, 1853--1907"
(January 1, 1997).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI9800903.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9800903
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