This expedition begins with the symbolic Midwest that emerged in the Bildungsroman at the fin de siècle, a literary region in which the young individual's development allegorically demarcated the nation's potential for unrestrained growth. That region was imagined as an open thoroughfare for industrial modernity's ideology of westward territorial expansion, both domestically and abroad. The precipitously developing plains “exposed the fault lines in previous American institutions without clearly replacing them with new ones,” as its seemingly boundless “prairie, grids, transportation corridors, and cash crops” informed “the genteel standardization or rationalization of social and business life” of middle-class America (Katz and Mahoney xxii). Chicago formed the strategic junction in the ebb and flow of intraregional rail traffic, contributing to the city's reputation as offering limitless mobility, which denied the rationalization of local life under industrial development. Train lines created the “geographic terms” by which the city-region's “cultural and literary identity” communicated the story of self-making through migration, as “told from the provincial point of view,” Timothy Spears observes (8). Chicago posed a curious paradox, as various scholars note; despite its metropolitan ascendency, it still performed the role of a “provincial city” within the nation's regional imaginary (Cappetti 8–10; Spears xviii).

Midwestern naturalism was forged within that paradox. From the Progressive Era, many writers presented the uneven landscape of the Midwest as being concentrated in its new metropolises, especially Chicago, the local writerly “atmosphere” of which “challenged the traditional approaches to [news] feature writing” (Hricko 4), by descriptively accentuating “strikes, slaughterhouses, railroads and poverty” as being elements of the region's modern character (Woolley 9). Novels such as Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser and The Jungle (1906) by Upton Sinclair evinced how the effects of industrialization upon the character of the Midwest also shifted the ontologies of individual autonomy, labor, and leisure that were central to bourgeois realism. Such novels often recalibrated the Bildungsroman's poetics of the local—specifically, local color fiction, which had become the sentimental stigma on the face of an emergent class within American literary realism that privileged unforgiving representations of the effects of industrialism on everyday life: urban naturalism. This mode provided an alternative to the classical Bildungsroman's model of development, based upon sociological models of social development.