Surviving the crossing: (Im)migration, ethnicity and gender in trans -national America

Although Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen did not collaborate in a recognized school or movement, they produced works of literary modernism that reveal common preoccupations with identity formation and that substitute fluid conceptions of alliance for the more rigid ones of the nineteenth-century. In particular, my dissertation argues that in works produced between 1909 and 1937, these writers redraw the boundaries between such binaries as the native-born American and the immigrant, the American nationalist and the expatriate, compulsory heterosexuality and gay identity, the cultural mainstream and emerging minorities. I question the generic and canonical divisions that have traditionally placed these three writers in distinct, non-intersecting, and often marginal literary categories: prairie or pioneer literature for Cather, high modernism or avant-garde experimentalism for Stein, and Harlem Renaissance for Larsen. I also argue that the cultural climate that gave rise to interwar transnationalism concomitantly facilitated a relaxing of identity categories and fostered new conceptions of personal, professional, and national identity. Complicating binary paradigms of national, ethnic, and gender identities, I demonstrate how these writers bring language to bear on the fixity of identity, easing constricting categorical boundaries and creating uniquely modernist selves---in spite of critical and popular resistance to their refusal to conform to literary and societal expectations. Analyzing and reconceptualizing the concepts of margin and center, dual citizenship, crossing, and passing, I show how writing served as a crucial strategy for both identification and survival for Cather, Stein, and Larsen.