Worldly desires [electronic resource] : fictions of transnational engagement in Frank Norris, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Edith Wharton
Keywords: English.

Worldly Desires: Fictions of Transnational Engagement in Frank Norris, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Edith Wharton, examines three novelists not often drawn together in literary histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This historical period has been characterized in many ways, from Gilded Age to Progressive Era. The period also marks the beginning of what has been called the "American Century" and a more sustained U.S. involvement with, and intervention in, the world outside its territorial borders. This involvement was signaled in rapid succession by imperial action in the Philippines, the annexation of the territory of Hawaii, and an increasingly interventionist foreign policy stance in relation to the Americas. While a pithy designation such as "American Century" may reflect the triumphal outcome of expansionist or profit-driven ventures, it also glosses over much, including concurrent cultural work that explored the consequences of an emerging U.S. globalism. Novelists in an era of mass publishing and readership were well suited as public figures and as fiction writers to intervene in a public conversation over a sustained U.S. engagement with the world. They did so in ways that often fell outside the power-profit binary that drove policy and decision-making. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes obliquely, each of the three writers I consider registers a compelling interest with the world exterior to local or regional settings that serve in their fiction as points of geographical origin. I read their work, therefore, with a focus on its geopoetical features: plots whose unfolding development necessitates shifts in setting, the social and geographical aspirations characters express, and the textual prevalence of spatial or geographical language. In regionally set novels, these and other textual strategies stand out as discordant yet key pieces of evidence confirming a growing attention toward the world at a pivotal moment in literary and national history. I show then how the prospect of a broader national engagement with the world outside continental borders prompts each writer to reflect upon domestic concerns dear to them. Norris's adventure fiction builds, for example, on the preoccupation he expresses in his critical writing with a representative U.S. literature and what historical and literary factors might contribute to it. In Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece, the world outside the southern Black Belt occupies the text as a concept and setting that tantalizes yet eludes its young, educated African-American characters. The rhetorical force of Du Bois's "Criteria of Negro Art" speech depends in my reading on his geographical survey of the domestic and international factors that impacted African-American artistic training and production. In my final chapter, I discuss Edith Wharton's under-regarded World War I-era writing. I show how her European relief efforts of the period and her entreaties to American audiences to fund those efforts builds upon a sustained thematic engagement in fiction and public discourse with the mechanics of sympathy and charitable giving.