'The language that most Americans know': Race, ethnicity, and literary realism, 1890--1910 (William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin)

This dissertation examines the relations among discourses of race, ethnicity, and literary realism in the writings of William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Mary Antin, and Abraham Cahan. Literary representations of the “foreign” in realist literature of the 1890s reveal much about the ways that accelerated patterns of transnational migration challenged commonly held definitions of national identity. Perceptions of migration exerted a significant undermining force on the project of realism as a nationalizing literature. As recent critics like Matthew Frye Jacobson have argued, migrants often didn't perceive themselves as participants in a national experience of assimilation. Examining representations of the foreign in the literature of these authors, I argue that migrants work to undermine the nationalizing efforts of realism to define and delimit “America” by constantly presenting the specter of a transnationalist perspective. I develop this argument by focusing on the tropes of language and violence: frequently in contemporary discussions of the “immigration problem,” commentators and authors lamented the inaccessibility of these new groups to the lingua franca, in turn using this as conscious or unconscious justification for the exercise of violence upon the immigrant body, textual or physical. A renewed focus on the relationship between migration and literary realism has broader implications for reassessing racializations of other, non-European groups perceived as “foreign” and excluded from dominant notions of national identity.