Ingenious devices: Engineering fictions and American technophilia, 1900--1940 (Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather)

My dissertation examines how authors and readers from the middle and privileged classes apprehended the rise of science in America between 1900 and 1940, a period crucial because of the accelerated pace and scale of industrial expansion, and because an unprecedented number of citizens identified science with expanded freedom and social progress. I focus chiefly on novels, both those, written by well-established literary figures including Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and Willa Cather, and others mass produced in the tradition of the dime novel---the civil engineering romances which became best sellers between 1900 and 1920, and the immensely successful Tom Swift series for boys (1910--1940). As none of my authors and few of their readers were schooled in science and technology, I also examine the nonfictional sources which informed lay conceptions of these disciplines---scientific popularizations, success treatises, advertising, and public relations campaigns. Simultaneously, I analyze how the writing and reading of this literature varied across the class spectrum to discover how technological changes in the publishing industry influenced consumers' perceptions of the texts they purchased.; The condition for the emergence of this fiction, paradoxically enough, was the widening cultural rift between scientists and non-scientists. Because few members of the general public understood the material they were appropriating, their educational experiences and social concerns largely determined their disparate conceptions of science and technology. Educated writers and readers who identified with the eroding genteel tradition in American letters often eschewed science and technology as threats to their cultural authority. In response, they crafted escapist fantasies which often identified intellectual writers with research scientists. Members of the middle class encountered science and technology primarily through the new, mass market advertising campaigns, and most accepted the promise that cutting-edge consumer products would simplify their lives and advertise their ascendancy without significant cost or risk. Yet when the growth of corporations and cartels began to challenge the cherished American myth of professional autonomy, middle-class writers betrayed their anxiety in myriad compensatory myths. Science and technology thus provided a culturally charged playing field on which different social groups projected a host of unrelated anxieties.