| In this dissertation, I examine the relationships between the reportorial effect of realist-tended narrative and the narrative effects of various forms of reportage in work by W. D. Howells, Stephen Crane, and Harold Frederic. What unites all this work is not the coincidence of their publication, but the depth of the correspondence between reportorial strategies being developed in investigative journalism and the brand of "realism" then coming into vogue in the U.S. Moreover, the placement of fiction, travel narratives, sketches, and tales, alongside more traditionally recognizable news stories, all written by the same group of people, and all published in the same venues, signals a broader and more pervasive cultural demand for a stable and coherent form of reference. This project traces the development of this cultural demand and its articulation across these venues, uncovering the larger ideological pressures sustaining them.; Newspapers, the periodical press, and realist fiction all converge in this period to offer the utopic promise of democratic possibility for written forms of representation. When amplified by the distribution strategies of the feature syndicates through the effective saturation of the national terrain, this utopic effect redoubles. Journalism and realist fiction collude and collide in this period to produce a representative form we might call "fictions of referentiality" that emerges as an effective restraint for this utopic promise. These "fictions of referentiality" help stabilize a rapidly transforming world, lending to everyday life a narrative familiarity commonly found in notions of "common-sense." When underwritten by the postures of scientific objectivity associated with the late nineteenth century, they produce a renewed faith in specialization and authority that allows stronger, more nuanced ties between individuals and social and institutional positions. Finally, these fictions produce social taxonomies that align local, regional, and national identities in a kind of metonymy of affiliation, eliding class and other social conflicts on the domestic scene as much as on the global. These fictions also help demonstrate why it is realism and journalism themselves---those democratic byproducts of the hypostatized obsession with the eye---that correspond to become the privileged mode for telling tales. |
