Heartland cosmopolitanism: the Midwest and literary modernism in the work of Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis
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Abstract
In 1922 Carl Van Doren noticed that a revolt from the village was taking place in modern American writing, especially when it came to the midwestern United States. According to Van Doren, where James Whitcomb Riley and Booth Tarkington’s local color humor made the small-town Midwest the celebrated center of American values in the late nineteenth century, writers like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis used modern literary techniques like realism and symbolism to make the region a peripheral site of resistance to the forces of urban-industrialization and globalization that were reshaping U.S. culture and society in the early twentieth century. Since the 1920s, this assessment of the Midwest’s cultural parochialism has reinforced conceptions of the region’s political provincialism, which emerged thanks to regional politicians’ like Minnesota governor Joseph Burnquist and senator Frank B. Kellogg’s efforts to privilege domestic issues and local concerns over foreign affairs. As a result of this parochial reputation, the region has been largely overlooked in studies of U.S. literary modernism, which is typically associated with metropolitan centers and transnational exchange.
By attending to Cather and Lewis’s representations of the transnational communities and economies that structured the Midwest’s growth in the Progressive era, this dissertation rejects assumptions about the region’s perennial parochialism to emphasize its historical cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it shows how Cather and Lewis mobilized the region’s history of migration, settlement, and urbanization to critique the failures of U.S. political progressivism, and asserts the midwestern hinterland’s participation in the development of U.S. literary modernism. Specifically, I argue that by representing the relationships between immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens in the modern Midwest’s social and cultural institutions, Cather and Lewis subvert the progressive themes and consensus-building impulses of literary realism to critique the rise of U.S. commercial capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism.