| In telling the story of the twentieth-century American novel, scholars tend to deemphasize the nineteen-forties, -fifties, and early-sixties as constituting a cohesive literary period. Instead, when discussing novelists writing in the mid-century, literary critics tend to engage with authors within particular categories of identity. In an effort to reconceptualize this period, "Mapping an Era" considers a range of writers, male and female, with different regional affiliations and ethnicities, who nevertheless ought to be seen as participating in a unified and nationalized cultural project: to use the realist novel form to interrogate American cultural identity and the role of the nation state. In particular, this project reveals that novelists who came of age in the New Deal era (including Eudora Welty, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow, John Okada, Ralph Ellison, and Mary McCarthy) identify rural, suburban, ethnic urban, and campus landscapes as sites for grappling with the notion of a collective national narrative in the late forties, fifties, and early sixties.;An evaluation of fiction in terms of national space is particularly useful for studying the mid-century era because it contextualizes a common conversation across gender, race, and region that has been obscured by the post-sixties culture wars. Mid-century nation builders in the United States strive to unify a geographically, ethnically, and socially diverse population within geographical and historical borders. Taking their cue from national rhetoric, mid-century novelists perform cognitive mappings of the relationship between individualized experience and national identity; however, the novel form extends the national project, functioning as a device both for exposing cracks in the myth of the nation and for identifying moments of possible collaboration between seemingly disparate groups. By amplifying historical, cultural and literary critical readings with humanistic geography, this dissertation allows for interventions from discourses of trauma, narrative, mapping and planning, and nationhood. In identifying these novels as spaces for calling into question simultaneously the viability (and desirability) of nationalized identity and the revolutionary potential of the novel at that historical moment, "Mapping an Era" locates rumblings in the landscape of the mid-century that will ultimately lead to the radical rupture of the 1960s. |
