University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Reading the middle: US women novelists and print culture, 1930-1960

Vigiletti, Elyse R

Content Files
VIGILETTI-DISSERTATION-2016.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/90868

Description

Title
Reading the middle: US women novelists and print culture, 1930-1960
Author(s)
Vigiletti, Elyse R
Issue Date
2016-04-22
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Foote, Stephanie
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Foote, Stephanie
Committee Member(s)
  • Hutner, Gordon
  • Somerville, Siobhan
  • Underwood, William T
  • Bauer, Dale
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Date of Ingest
2016-07-07T21:04:24Z
Keyword(s)
  • Print culture
  • Novel
  • Women Writers
  • Feminism
  • Digital Humanities
  • Twentieth-Century Literature
  • American Studies
  • American Literature
  • Edna Ferber
  • Patricia Highsmith
  • Ann Petry
  • Lillian Smith
  • Jessie Fauset
  • Genre Fiction
  • Crime Fiction
Abstract
"""Reading the Middle: US Women Novelists and Print Culture, 1930-1960"" is about feminist protest as a core value of the American bourgeoisie, bringing gender studies, digital humanities, and American literature and print culture together in analyses of a collection of thirty-plus novels of mid-twentieth-century women writers. In it, I argue that the women writers of mainstream fiction in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s summoned carefully circumscribed deployments of critical paradigms such as feminism, antiracism, and anticapitalism to allow their American middle-class audience to elevate their leisure reading to a passively productive exercise in intellectual stimulation. In so doing, these writers helped establish and refine a uniquely twentieth-century phase of American progressivism that persisted long past their individual novels' fame."
Graduation Semester
2016-05
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/90868
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2016 Elyse Vigiletti

Owning Collections

Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
Graduate Theses and Dissertations at Illinois