Coining humor: Forms of conversion and the making of mass culture in nineteenth century America

In its broadest sense, this dissertation theorizes the role of the thriving late-nineteenth-century humor industry in the emergence of U.S. mass culture. Working from a cultural materialist theory that stresses the impact of material and economic processes on literary production, I trace humor's impact on popular discourses and industries that directed mass culture's future. To this end, I employ a methodological focus on forms of conversion---dialectical processes through which things and ideas are changed materially and ideologically---to emphasize that what have come to be seen as natural relations between humor, nationality and popular literature are not inevitable. My objectives in this study are fourfold: (1) to document scenes of humor production vital to United States literary history that can stand in for larger scenes of cultural and literary activity in the nineteenth century (2) to intervene in nationalist and exceptionalist academic debates, mostly within North American cultural and literary studies, that miss the humor industry's significance for U.S. literature and mass culture (3) to bring cultural materialist theory and methodology to bear on the history of humor practice and (4) to imagine nineteenth-century literature and mass culture as unfinished, dynamic projects that still pressure politics, literature and culture in the twenty first century.In the introduction I establish the ground work of the project as a whole, articulating my goals as outlined above and explaining my theoretical commitment to cultural materialist inquiry. Through a reading of humor in one month's advertising section in Scribner's, I take stock of humor's relationship to advertising and provide a brief example of the kind of work I undertake throughout the project. Part One in two chapters extends the issues raised in the introduction by interrogating an academic tradition of nationalizing humor practice, and a mass culture tradition of selling humor stereotypes, that both convert humor practices into the matter of national and racial identities. Part Two in two chapters shifts the focus to the production of humor within specific institutional and professional settings in the 1890s.