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Metaphors of spectacle in Hawthorne's four major published novels provide a means of analyzing a range of concerns from character motivation and behavior to social organization and the institution of personal and/or political controls. I have taken "spectacle" to be "an organized visual display"; this definition includes elements such as performances, artworks, and works on paper, all of which are marked within the text by an announcement or frame indicating the introduction of a presentation. Each novel begins with a spectacle which introduces themes that are thereby made available for a cultural critique. For example, the action of The Scarlet Letter opens with the scene of Hester standing before the townspeople of Boston wearing a scarlet letter A on her dress. This spectacle--both the letter itself and the staging of it at the center of an assertion of legal power--initiates an organizing motif for the entire novel. As a potentially powerful vehicle of social control, spectacle provides an illustration of contestation among multiple interests in areas such as gender formation, the administration of the law, and the role of the arts. Each novel explores the effectiveness of various strategies for the establishment of effects in social relations, demonstrating the tenuousness of attempts by individuals or institutions to enforce particular configurations on others. Hawthorne's fictions suggest possibilities for resistance to dominant depictions of relations by situating selected characters in regard to the characteristic spectacle of a particular situation. Since spectacle highlights in compact, dramatic form the convergence of social forces, its study facilitates the implementation of a variety of analytical approaches, including new historicist, psychoanalytic, reader response, feminist, and deconstructionist. This dissertation will utilize methodologies drawn from these approaches in an application of close reading in order to elucidate a theory of spectacle as it operates within Hawthorne's four major novels, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.

Harriette Simpson Arnow's ambivalent relationship to her native Appalachia and to her family is evident in the ambiguity of her literary work. The struggle between her love of the region and a need to be independent of and not defined by it is reflected in Arnow's choice of themes, her ambiguous endings, and her documentary style. Arnow's works reveal an experience of regionalism as a form of ethnic identity, one of many identities (American, writer, woman) and a fluidity to be negotiated rather than a reification by which to be marginalized.

In the spring of 1939, the Bierstadt family is forced by financial failure to give up its home and move to the country to take over an inn whose principal virtue is that it is on the main route--historic Route 20--leading to the World's Fair in New York's Flushing Meadows. The family consists of Stan and Ellen along with their children, Loretta, Stefan, and Rosalind, and Ellen's mother, Hattie. They are part of an extended Polish-American family, a sprig of an ethnic group that has inhabited upstate New York from the 1880's to the present. The action of the novel occurs during a six-month period leading up to cataclysmic September 1--with tragic familial results.

This dissertation is a comprehensive critical survey of Weldon Kees's fiction. The Introduction to this study situates elements of Kees's fiction within competing literary traditions: Naturalism, Modernism, and Social Realism. Sherwood Anderson's fiction is Kees's chief model for his stories of entrapment: tales that portray Depression-era denizens of the Midwest in constrictive, tension-laden situations. By contrast, an equally sizable portion of Kees's short fiction is satire in the Sinclair Lewis vein. In terms of prose style, Kees mostly imitated Hemingway. Yet James T. Farrell was also an important influence. Farrell's proletarian concerns, social determinism, and use of indirect discourse all loom large in Kees's work as well. Still Kees's master theme--alienation leading to identity dissolution--is distinctly his own. Chapter One surveys Kees's apprentice work as a fiction writer. These dozen stories, published between 1934 and 1937, exhibit considerable thematic diversity. Testing the range of his creative powers, Kees wrote tales of failed romance, satires, stories of entrapment, tales of rescue and escape. A recurring theme is the weak male at the mercy of the dominant female. Chapter Two examines some sixteen stories Kees published between 1937 and 1940. This phase of Kees's work is marked by an increasingly strong bifurcation between satires and stories of entrapment, a bifurcation indicative of Kees's deeply conflicted feelings regarding his family and his native community. During this period Kee's misogynist tendencies are most pronounced. Chapter Three is a reading of Kees's novel, Fall Quarter, (1941) as a story of entrapment. The protagonist, William Clay, is an incipient alcoholic involved in a deluded romance that nearly destroys him: Kees's commentary on the dangers arising from arrested identity formation. Chapter Four examines Kees's later fiction, published between 1940 and 1945. In these last stories, the authorial fear and loathing for mainstream America much manifest in the earlier work softens. Kees's harsh portrayals of women become more empathic and satire and story of entrapment merge into a new form, marked by thoroughgoing irony. All of these developments tends to indicate that Kees had come to some understanding about his own identity--and internal resolution that allowed him to redefine his relationship to his culture, from rage to pity.

This work considers Samuel Clemens' philosophies of mind and nature in the context of the emerging nineteenth-century discipline of physiological psychology. Study of Clemens' work in this context suggests that rather than naively repudiating nineteenth-century science in an anti-intellectual attempt to re-create the pastoral age of ante-bellum America, Clemens created a humorous style consistent with the evolutionary theory on which the new psychology was based. The work argues that the purpose, the content and the structure of Clemens' fiction anticipates the functional and pragmatic psychologies of William James and the Chicago School, drawing upon close readings of primary works written between 1870 and 1886, psychological and scientific texts and histories, and scholarly work on humor drawn from anthropological, myth, and literary criticism. Clemens, like the psychologists, defines human consciousness as adaptive response to the environment. The content of his humor typically focuses on the ways in which ingrained and unconscious habits of belief promote maladaptive response, and his humorous performances capitalize on these features of his listeners' intellects to provoke a response to his humor. Typically the storyteller in a Clemens' work fails to achieve his apparent narrative purpose, because of his ingrained patterns of thinking. This defeats the expectations of the audience, because of their own ingrained patterns of thinking. The audience's reaction, a quantifiable physical expression of surprise, represents the adjustment of internal subjective consciousness to objective reality. The humor actually irritates the audience, illustrating the inadequacy of the ingrained belief that Herbert Spencer calls "instinct" and that Clemens himself calls "petrified thought." Clemens' humor forces the audience to consciousness, simulating what the physiological psychologists would later define as "learning." The manipulative character of Clemens' humor mirrors the purposeful agenda of the physiological psychologists who believed that they could legitimize their science by helping Americans adapt successfully to their environments. Rather than resisting the science of his age, Clemens embraces it in order to make humor a respected educational vehicle for his reading and listening public.