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America’s ‘long early twentieth century’ (1890-1945) was a period of intense industrialization, urbanization, and immigration which fundamentally altered the character of the nation. Between 1900 and 1924, which saw the curtailing of immigration from southern and eastern Europe via the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (successor to 1921’s stop-gap Emergency Quota Act), more than 14 million people flocked to the U.S. in search of economic opportunity, social equality, and freedom from religious and political oppression. Descendants of these ‘new immigrants,’ as they were called, were by the late twentieth century a staple of white American suburbia, but their progenitors were variously considered ‘off-white,’ ‘dark-white,’ or non-white, with attendant connotations of mental, physical, and moral inferiority. This research examines texts, authored by Jewish immigrants such as Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, Rose Cohen, and Mary Antin, which were published between 1890 and 1930, when the onset of the Great Depression saw a rise in anti-Semitism that contributed to the decline in popularity of ‘up by the bootstraps’ Americana whose narratives chronicled, ostensibly, social assimilation and cultural integration; it considers the ramifications of writing in English for a native audience, which frequently alienated Jewish immigrants from their peers, and analyzes the manner in which the United States’ shifting social mores coincided with—and facilitated—new immigrants’ reappraisal of religion, education, commerce, and family life in the ‘new world’ of the west. It argues that the ambivalence contained within many of these texts was both a reaction to nativist prejudices and an effort to expose misconceptions present on both sides of the wildly popular Americanization movement, as well as exploring the way that such narratives attempted the redefinition of American philanthropic, educational and civic paradigms—the preponderance of which passionately espoused rhetoric of equality while reinforcing the stratification of the United States’ class system—into modes of interaction that accommodated difference while seeking to establish common ground upon which could be built a more inclusive, multiethnic future. Finally, it addresses the continuing relevance of these works as texts which both predict and presage modern modes of social interaction and discusses their future in an evolving literary canon that has, historically speaking, been an agent of western patriarchal hegemony.

By drawing upon aspects of critical geography to explore three writers' representations of urban space and subject formation, American Ethni/Cities develops and advocates for a new methodological approach to the study of literature. Predicated on theories devised by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Gil Valentine and other geographically-minded thinkers, this spatially conscious literary practice has the potential to enhance one's understanding of literary texts, power dynamics, identity construction, and the spaces one inhabits. Each of the chapters comprising this study aims to demonstrate what this interdisciplinary partnership between geography and literature can reveal. By focusing on Cahan's representation of Jewish immigrants living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Wright's depiction of black migrants adjusting to life in the industrial North, and Baldwin's exploration of masculinity as a socio-spatial construct, each respective case-study draws attention to the relationship between spatial production and subject formation. The overarching hope of American Ethni/Cities is that others will find this inter-disciplinary partnership productive and will subsequently make it their own, thereby producing even greater understandings of how power works in the spaces we read about, create, and inhabit in our own daily lives.

How has the concept of masculinity been revised and adapted by different writers over the course of the early to mid-20th century? How and why did the authors respond to the question of masculinity differently? To answer these questions, this dissertation navigates the contested nature of masculinity in works spanning the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I juxtapose two to three writers and their selected works in each chapter divided by the authors’ race and ethnicity: William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright by focusing on Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, and Native Son respectively; Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel; Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. The writers I examine present masculinities that deviate from hegemonic masculinity, challenge and/or reinforce the definition and parameters of hegemonic masculinity, and develop models of masculinity that meet the needs of their specific historical moments. I argue that juxtaposing different modalities of masculinity construction and exploring the multifaceted treatment of American masculinity afford a more comprehensive perspective about the avenues through which masculinity is made manifest. My examination of multiple masculinities reveals the processes of establishing, maintaining, and contesting hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, tracking historical changes in masculinities uncovers how a set of essentialized traits, though changing, have transformed into and manifested as a privileged form of masculinity. / English

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This dissertation explores the idea of the 1970s as a critical turning point for the representation of young Jewish women in American popular culture, specifically considering examples from popular literature, popular film, television, and comedy that undermine the validity of midcentury conceptions of the Jewish-American Princess (JAP) or Jewish Ugly Duckling. The introduction and first chapter establish the historical context of how stereotypes of Jewish women—including the JAP—came to be used as a means of mitigating assimilation-related anxieties, especially in light of the post-WWII Jewish ascent into the white suburban middle class. The dissertation then transitions into a deeper investigation of female-driven responses to these archetypes. With the rise of the contemporary Feminism movement, the sexual revolution, the Jewish New Wave of filmmaking, and the shift in emphasis from assimilation to multiculturalism within the American social consciousness, the 1970s provided a platform for Jewish female authors, entertainers, and filmmakers to directly respond to and reconceive the stereotypes of Jewish women honed during the midcentury period. The second, third, and fourth chapters each tackle a different facet of popular culture, looking specifically at how popular literature, film, television, and comedy produced by Jewish women confirmed, complicated, and challenged stereotypes of Jewish women, effectively shifting the cultural paradigm away from the JAP and towards a new understanding of Jewish female identity that undermined existing archetypes. In this way, the dissertation argues that Jewish female-driven popular literature, film, television, and comedy during this time period acted as a bridge between the more one-dimensional, often male-driven midcentury conceptions of the JAP and the more complex, nuanced images of young Jewish women in contemporary popular culture. Simply put, while the novels, films, and series that are explored here all draw from the hegemonic stereotypes of young Jewish women established in the 1950s and 1960s, they also articulate something new about Jewish women in their privileging of the Jewish woman’s voice, their re-conception of Jewish beauty, and their questioning of gender norms, and thus can be seen as the natural predecessors of modern popular cultural depictions of Jewish women.

This thesis examines the contribution of Jewish artists to American popular culture in the mid-twentieth century and argues that the Jewish imagination contains a peculiar ability to simultaneous articulate the concerns of a specifically ethnic identity and a more universal American character. The thesis posits that by exploring how the Jewish community negotiated the space between ethnic identity and an American paradigm, Jewish artists were able to explore the middle ground between individuality and conformity, selfhood and consensus, liberalism and conservatism, tradition and change, and heritage and progress that held a wider pertinence for a more general American audience. The thesis argues that the diversity of the Jewish American imagination at this time can be united by a leitmotif that can be best described as the ambivalence of transition. By examining aesthetically dissimilar texts from a variety of artistic fields, in particular comic books, theatre, cinema, television, and literature, the thesis argues that despite the cultural evolutions that occurred throughout the thirties, forties and fifties, the Jewish voice articulated a continuing concern regarding the relationship between ethnic identity, masculine identity, the individual and mass culture. This last point hints at another preoccupation of this thesis; the texts analysed here all share a narrative focus that explores and represents notions of masculine identity and ideality. In this way, the thesis necessarily focuses upon debates about masculinity within the Jewish imagination and American culture, charting the evolution of the Jewish and American male and their relationship towards notions of performed, consensus, individual and paradigm masculinity. Although there has not necessarily been a desire to fully deny the notion of a continuing thematic preoccupation within the Jewish imaginary, previous scholarship has shown a tendency towards accentuating the eclectic nature of Jewish American culture. Whilst scholars like Paul Buhle and Stephen J. Whitfield recognise the importance of popular culture as an arena in which Jewish artists sought to articulate issues at the heart of Jewish identity and community in the US, their studies focus upon the kaleidoscopic eclecticism of Jewish American culture. The intention of this thesis is to harness the diversity inherent in Jewish cultural expression via the prevailing leitmotif of the ambivalence of transition. In this way the thesis will use the multifarious and textured fabric of mid-century Jewish culture, as well as the simultaneous articulation of both ethnic and more general concerns, to illuminate the understanding of both Jewish identity and American culture throughout the mid-century. Thus, the thesis builds upon work by the likes of Julian Levinson and Hana Wirth-Nesher that revisits ideas of assimilation and attempts to complicate the inexorable movement away from Jewish distinctiveness and identity. Similarly, the thesis builds upon studies by the likes of Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Will Brooker that attempt to accentuate the reductive understanding of the mid-century based upon boundless suburbia and unthinking conformity.