Incognitos: Modern Slumming Narratives and the Unmaking of Sexual Identity
Herring, Terrell Scott
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81401
Description
Title
Incognitos: Modern Slumming Narratives and the Unmaking of Sexual Identity
Author(s)
Herring, Terrell Scott
Issue Date
2004
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Tim Dean
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
American Studies
Language
eng
Abstract
"Though the slumming narrative is a minor literary genre that typically uncovers and classifies urban racial-ethnic and sexual ""perversions,"" ""Incognitos"" contends that some sexually suspect early-twentieth-century writers---white and Black---manipulated its form to avoid sexual exposure and to challenge developing constructions of sexuality in modern America. Through divergent styles, Progressive-era realists such as Jane Addams and Willa Cather, Afro-Modernist bohemians like Wallace Thurman and Richard Bruce Nugent, and transatlantic Anglo-American Modernists such as Carl Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes renovate a genre traditionally dedicated to sexual surveillance and categorization. Together these writers question the value of an identifiable homosexual identity and subculture while they simultaneously confirm and interrogate developing racial-ethnic identities, thereby illuminating how a minor genre has significant cultural ramifications for developing notions of visibility and invisibility in modern U.S. literary public spheres."
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