Transnational Peripheries: Narratives of Countryside, Migration, and Community in American and Nordic Modernisms
| dc.contributor.advisor | Whalan, Mark | |
| dc.contributor.author | Pöllänen, Iida | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-09-24T17:43:45Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-09-24 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Scholarship in modernist literary and cultural studies tends to privilege urban spaces while excluding rural regions from mappings of world literature. Regional writing has been both effeminized as a genre and seen as contrary to the transnational nature of modernism, leaving little consideration for the role of the countryside in modernity. My dissertation broadens the spatial scope of modernist studies by showing how the countryside functioned as a place for women authors in peripheral locations of the world to both critique the uneven development of modernity as well as to provide alternative visions of future communities. I examine how the countryside and its communities became imagined in American and Nordic modernist literary texts written by and about linguistic and ethnic minorities in the first half of the twentieth century. My main case studies are Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (1915), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), and Hagar Olsson’s Träsnidaren och döden (1940, The Woodcarver and Death), and as I engage with these works, I draw from the fields of feminist regionalism, transnational modernist studies, and narrative theory. By choosing the American and Northern European countryside and their transatlantic connections as sites of comparison, my project connects linguistic-national literary archives typically not associated with one another, while showing how women authors in various cultural contexts employed regionalism and transnationalism as a form of feminist praxis to negotiate their place in modernity. Far from being antagonistic to modernity and cosmopolitanism, as often represented in the white and masculine canon of modernism, rural regions were used in these texts as sites for considering gendered and racialized questions of immigration, (trans)nationality, and community. Thus, my approach maps a new cartography of modernism that highlights the artistic critiques and networks of authors writing about the intersections of various historically marginalized identity categories. | en_US |
| dc.description.embargo | 2022-08-17 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/25712 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | American literature | en_US |
| dc.subject | Feminism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Modernism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Narrative theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | Regionalism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Transnationalism | en_US |
| dc.title | Transnational Peripheries: Narratives of Countryside, Migration, and Community in American and Nordic Modernisms | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Comparative Literature | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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