Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T06:36:15.999Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 1 - From Prairie to Metropolis: Chicago as the American “Shock City”

from Part I - The Rise of Chicago and the Literary West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2021

Frederik Byrn Køhlert
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Get access

Summary

This chapter analyzes how turn-of-the-twentieth-century Chicago fiction responded to rapid urbanization. Chicago qualified as what Asa Briggs has called a “shock city”: it embodied the disruption of the Industrial Revolution. The city challenged the nineteenth-century pastoralist view of the American republic because it rose in just a few decades from the Midwestern heartland. Chicago’s urban novelty triggered a reconfiguration of American fiction as writers grappled with a social reality resisting nineteenth-century literary codes. Two varieties of Chicago fiction – realist novels of manners (Henry Blake Fuller; Robert Herrick) and urban naturalism (Theodore Dreiser; Frank Norris; Upton Sinclair) – negotiated this cultural change. The former perpetuated the formula of domestic fiction in a context where the kinship-based knowable community was threatened by economic forces undermining its foundation. The latter sought to represent the new economic determinants through discourses relying on nature romanticism and the gothic. The shift from novels of manners to naturalism produced a new literary topography of the urban world, marking the transition from realism to modernism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Chicago
A Literary History
, pp. 17 - 30
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×