Date of Completion
5-5-2016
Embargo Period
5-3-2026
Keywords
American, Literature, Nationalism, Sound, Race, Imperialism, Americanism, Performance, Music
Major Advisor
Cathy Schlund-Vials
Associate Advisor
Martha Cutter
Associate Advisor
Christopher Vials
Field of Study
English
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Open Access
Campus Access
Abstract
In a post-Civil War imaginary marked by increased racialization, vehement nativism, and expanding imperialism, a new debate over national identity converged on the terrain of so-termed “American music.” These aural and auditory frames foreground this dissertation, which takes seriously the ways in which writers, playwrights, and lyricists identified new possibilities for and the limitations of dominant-held notions of political and cultural citizenship through the interconnected spheres of literature and sound. Such productions, which converge on the notion of “American music,” divergently echoed, reflected, and refracted political contestations over who did and did not belong to the U.S. nation-state. This multiracial, multiethnic sound studies project, which begins at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and concludes with the Great Depression, explores the integral sites of “American-ness” as an unstable and dynamic concept in the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Israel Zangwill, Irving Berlin, Raymond Egan, and Américo Paredes.
Recommended Citation
Higgins, Shawn M., "Literary Soundscapes: Nationalism and U.S. Literature, 1890-1940" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 1085.
https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/dissertations/1085