Abstract
At the turn of the twentieth century, sociologists identified “promiscuous spaces, where people mingled with strangers, where boundaries were fluid, and traditional spatial segregation according to class, race, religion, sexuality, gender, or nationality held no purchase.”1 Such “promiscuous space” resonates with what historian Amy Richter has recently identified as the rise of “public domesticity” on rail cars in the latter half of the nineteenth century, which reshaped the social conventions of acceptable and respectable interaction between strangers, particularly for white, middle-class women.2 Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel, Sister Carrie, articulates his own understanding of changing spatial forms in the midst of both of these cultural formations and demonstrates the tensions between imagined and material spaces for many turn-of-the-century Americans.3
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Notes
Priscilla Wald, “Dreiser’s Sociological Vision,” in The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser, ed. Leonard Cassuto and Clare Virginia Eby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 182.
Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Penguin, 1994)
Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 149
Babak Elahi’s The Fabric of American Literary Realism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009)
Gavin Jones’s American Hungers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008
Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 186
Beth Bailey’s From Front Porch to the Back Seat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 25.
Jack Santino’s 1989 Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
Alan Trachtenberg (in “Who Narrates? Dreiser’s Presence in Sister Carrie,” New Essays on Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pitzer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 87–122
Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 56.
Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985
Barbara Hochman, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Actress: The Rewards of Representation in Sister Carrie,” in New Essays on Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52.
Jennifer Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Charles Harmon’s “Cuteness and Capitalism in Sister Carrie” (American Literary Realism 32, no. 2 [2000], 125–39
Richard Lehan, “Sister Carrie: The City, the Self, and the Modes of Narrative Discourse,” New Essays on Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 71.
Caren J. Town, “The House of Mirrors: Carrie, Lily, and the Reflected Self,” Modern Language Studies 24, no. 3 (1994): 44.
Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997), 24.
David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 184.
Bertrall Ollman, Dialectical Investigations (London: Routledge, 1993), 37.
Melanie England, “Thoroughly Modern Carrie: Theodore Dreiser, Modernism, and the Historical Moment,” Midamerica 32 (2005): 88.
Frederick Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law (New York: Garland, 1990), 64.
See Nina Markov, “Reading and the Material Girl: Educating Sister Carrie,” Critical Sense 10, no. 1 (2002): 19–58
Marsha S. Moyer’s “Dreiser, Sister Carrie, and Mrs. Doubleday” (in Theodor Dreiser and American Culture, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000], 39–55)
Florence Dore’s The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005
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© 2011 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Collins, R. (2011). “Amid all the maze, uproar, and novelty”. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) Geocritical Explorations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337930_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337930_10
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