It is Jack London's attitude toward race which critics and scholars now find most embarrassing. Yet they offer no explanation of how this "regrettable flaw" arose in such an otherwise admirable socialist as London. My research shows that London's ideas and attitudes on race in general, i.e. racial evolution, social Darwinism, Aryanism, and eugenics, and on the superiority of the English-speaking branch of the Teutonic "race" in particular, as expressed in his fiction and essays, mirror those held by the majority of well-educated and prominent Americans prior to World War II. Chapter 1, "The Racial Education of Jack London," traces the emergence of London's racial consciousness from earliest childhood experience to the reason for his resignation from the Socialist Labor Party in 1916. Chapter 2, "Nineteenth Century Racial Theory," locates the major sources of London's belief in racial inequality in some of the most eminent race theorists of the period including Darwin, Galton, Huxley, Pearson, Spencer, Kidd, Haeckel, Weismann and others. Chapter 3, "Sexual Selection," shows how London's Yukon stories exemplify the "scientific" point of view by portraying human sexual behavior in terms of animal-like impulses which were thought to have evolved through the process of sexual selection. Chapter 4, "The Call of Kind," examines London's concept of gender, the "New Womanhood," and his faith in the "passion for perpetuation" (rightly guided) to improve mankind. Chapter 5, "Conclusion": London's stories dramatize the evolutionary superiority of the white man over all other peoples at a time when America needed to justify and explain her imperialist expansion abroad.

This thesis analyses the significance of socio-historical conceptions of money in relation to the development of American literary modernism from 1896 to 1944. Taking as its starting point Jean-Joseph Goux's contention that there was a correlation between the end of gold-backed money in France and the birth of French modernist literature, this study considers how far this claim is tenable in the American case. In 1896, the key debate surrounding the presidential election was over whether money should be backed by gold or silver specie, which became a major public issue. Faith in the gold standard was challenged, raising the possibility that the source of monetary value was negotiable. Subsequent policy changes, financial panics, the Depression and the World Wars all affected public conceptions of money, until the Bretton Woods Agreement instituted an international gold standard supported by the gold-backed U.S. dollar in 1944, effectively re-establishing a firm relationship between gold and money. Since the 1990s, New Economic Criticism has sought to understand the ways in which money and literature converge throughout history. Although several studies of money and American literary realism have been undertaken, the relationship between money and American literary modernism specifically has largely been overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the works of Robert Herrick, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, this thesis contends that a certain strand of American modernism developed as a series of reflections upon the relationship between money, value and realistic representation, in which the limitations of realism are exposed. Calling for a re-historicisation of the relationship between money and literature, this study argues that particular socio-historical moments in the story of American money emphasised the fluidity of money, sending social conceptions of value into flux in a society in which money functioned as the general equivalent by which all values were measured. These moments when accepted face values were called into question offered American writers the language and structure by which to consider and challenge the limitations of existing literary forms by comparing money with literature. Both paper money and literature, forms of representation which function via the inscription of words upon paper, contain an inherent duality; they have both a material value, in terms of their composition from paper and ink, and a deeper capacity to represent a certain value in the society in which they circulate. Modernism is concerned with such a duality, emphasising the materiality of the text and exposing the text's status as a representation that can never equal the reality that it represents. The authors discussed here confronted the discrepancy between written language as a reflection of the real world and words as material constructs in themselves through the metaphor of money, manifesting in both textual theme and structure, where the boundaries of realist representation are broken down via the use of unconventional forms. Utilising the method of close textual analysis and situating the texts examined within the wider socio-historical contexts of which they were born, the thesis focuses upon four different moments in the story of U.S. money and literature. This historically contingent approach facilitates the argument that these literary texts function as sites at which to examine and come to terms with contemporaneous social issues, helping to broaden both the purpose and structure of American literature in the early-twentieth century.

My dissertation examines post-civil rights novels by Toni Morrison, Ann Allen Shockley, and Alice Walker, and investigates their subversion of myopic representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination. More precisely, this study examines these writers' characterizations of black women who not only diverge from stereotypical images imposed by ideologies of “whiteness,” but who also rebel unapologetically against constructions of female identity imposed by nationalist discourse generally and black nationalism particularly. Drawing upon black feminist theoretical frameworks, performance theory, and postmodernist notions, this study analyzes these characters' transgressive behavior, specifically with regards to their sexuality, as, in part, a means to create a modern identity. While these notions have been engaged in non-literary texts that explicate how race and nationalism construct gender roles, they have been largely understudied in black women's fiction. This dissertation seeks to establish, then, a nexus in which literary texts, movement ideologies, and politics of identity and representation meet to provide an interdisciplinary and broad discursive framework. Organized conceptually, this study explores the aesthetics of transgression in an introduction, four representative chapters, and a conclusion. Chapter One introduces and situates transgressive black women characters within both the African American literary tradition and particular socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts. Chapter Two analyzes Toni Morrison's Sula (1973), and examines the protagonist Sula, who emblematizes transgressive behavior, as subverting the “classical black female script.” Foregrounding politics of sexuality, Chapter Three employs Shockley's Loving Her (1974) and investigates the ways Shockley's black female protagonist Renay, via her interracial same-gender loving relationship, transgresses essentialist binaries regarding blackness, same-sex desire, and homosexuality. Exploring the dialectics of transgression and belonging, Chapter Four examines Alice Walker's Meridian and analyzes the ways Meridian Hill transgresses circumscriptions for women, while concomitantly playing a participatory activist role in various communities. And, reemphasizing the potential of this study, the concluding chapter illustrates this project's centrality to African American and American literature, African American and American Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.