| My dissertation examines selected British and American novels at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, specifically, the ways in which they reflect and explore how commodity culture affects sexual desire. Using the industrial revolution and the expansive development of the retail, publishing, and advertising industries as a historical backdrop, I argue that England and America had divergent responses to the advent of what we now term consumer culture. Because English identity was so strongly entwined in a hereditary, land-based class system, while Americans defined and created identities for themselves based on the accumulation of wealth and goods, the United States was much more receptive to the advent of a commodity culture. Consequently, the American novels that I examine depict the desire for material goods as all-consuming, whereas the English novels reflect a much greater ambivalence about Britain's role as a consumer and producer. In this project I discuss works written between 1891 and 1913, by the novelists Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and E. M. Forster. Since these writers were at once imaginative artists, social critics, and professional authors, they were concerned with and wrote about the tensions between producing art for art's sake and as a marketable, saleable good. As both producers of literary works for consumption and consumers in their own right, these middle- and upper-class authors were directly affected by and aware of their nationalities, social status and class, their craft and sales. Their works, accordingly, display both their own and their society's stakes in the consuming passions of their time. |
