Reading American self-fashioning: Cosmopolitanism in the fiction of Maria Cristina Mena, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen

This dissertation explores the different modes of cosmopolitanism in The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (1873--1947), the short stories published in the 1910's by Maria Cristina Mena (1893--1965), and Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen (1891--1964). To analyze the way cosmopolitan narratives construct "an insider" and "an outsider" and the extent to which each of these writers, and their protagonists, occupy both spaces, I examine the relationship between colonizer and colonized in each text, focussing in particular on the expansionist implications of cosmopolitanism in an American setting. I also consider related instances of racial and sexual border-crossing through which these authors negotiate their own marginalization in American society. Because social and geographic mobility means challenging many borders, this study demonstrates the various ways in which these narratives represent liberation and/or confinement within the cosmopolitan genre.; In Chapter One, I present an overview of cosmopolitanism from a literary and historical perspective and I discuss this fiction in relationship to American culture and to literary trends of cosmopolitanism and regionalism. In Chapter Two, I read Mena's short stories as demonstrating her dual roles as citizen-of-the-world and immigrant, and discuss how she transforms the relationship between local color and cosmopolitanism by shifting among racialized perspectives. In Chapter Three, I explore the historical and biographical significance of Thea Kronborg's racial and sexual betrayals as she becomes an American cosmopolitan in The Song of the Lark. Chapter Four examines Larsen's confrontation and unraveling of national, racial, and sexual identities through her cosmopolitan protagonists in Quicksand and Passing. I compare Larsen's depiction of Helga in Quicksand, to Irene and Clare in Passing, and to the artists in the fiction of Cather and Mena. In my final chapter, I return to the cosmopolitan narratives of Cather, Mena, and Larsen with reference to their respective literary self-fashioning, and consider the significance of their travels to geographies of race, class, gender and sexuality in twentieth-century America.