Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America

Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies

James E. Dobson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319673219
• eBook ISBN: 9783319673226
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines temporal and formal disruptions found in American autobiographical narratives produced during the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that disruptions were primarily the result of encounters with new communication and transportation technologies. Through readings of major autobiographical works of the period, James E. Dobson argues that the range of affective responses to writing, communicating, and traveling at increasing speed and distance were registered in this literature's formal innovation. These autobiographical works, Dobson claims, complicate our understanding of the lived experience of time, temporality, and existing accounts of periodization. This study first examines the competing views of space and time in the nineteenth century and then moves to examine how high-speed train travel altered American literary regionalism, the region, and history. Later chapters examine two narratives of failed homecoming that are deeply ambivalent about modernity and technology, Henry James's The American Scene and Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday, before a reading of the telephone network as a metaphor for historiography and autobiography in Henry Adams's The Education of Henry Adams.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Chapter 1 The American Modernity Crisis and Disruptive Technologies
• Chapter 2 Modernity and the Dialectic of Detachment
• Chapter 3 “An Alien at Home”: Henry James’s Failed Homecoming
• Chapter 4 Theodore Dreiser, Temporary Homes, and the Compensatory Commemorative State
• Chapter 5 The Telephonic Self: Non-Systemic Systems and Autobiographical Self-Representation
• Bibliography
• Index