Narratives wrecked by success : the moneyed American good life from the Gilded Age to the 1929 crash / Jonathan B. Maney.

Format:

Book

Manuscript

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Maney, Jonathan B., author.

Contributor:

Barnard, Rita, degree supervisor.

Bentley, Nancy, degree committee member.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 1949- degree committee member.

University of Pennsylvania. Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Physical Description:

v, 228 leaves ; 29 cm

Production:

[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] : University of Pennsylvania, 2015.

Summary:

What if happiness, the object of so much economic and social striving, lacks narrative interest? What if success, once obtained, gives way to nothing more than drab successiveness? This dissertation entertains these questions by examining what happens to literary characters when (and after) they get what they want. It assembles a literary archive of narratives "wrecked by success" and argues that this archive constitutes a pessimistic sequel to the traditional American success narrative; acts as an important catalyst of literary historical change; and allows us to explore zones of experience, such as prosperity, comfort, and idleness, that do not lend themselves readily to narrative treatment. Intertwining literary criticism, narrative theory, happiness studies, and classical and contemporary economics, "Narratives Wrecked by Success" takes as its point of departure the period of the United States' emergence as the world's most industrialized and wealthiest country. It shows that the swift rise in the standard of living during the Gilded Age and the first three decades of the twentieth century compelled many American narratives to reckon more directly with the realization of economic good-life fantasies, with the stories of characters who have-often to excess-their objects of desire. It further shows that the intensification of prosperity during this period yielded surprisingly few literary narratives of happiness. Instead, the introduction of economic abundance as a feature of American cultural life tended to produce skepticism about material progress, subjective well-being, and upward mobility. Reading texts by Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, William James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the dissertation argues that the moneyed good life proves to be less engaging, less capable of eliciting fantasy, motivating action and sustaining narrative interest-less "narratable" or "tellable" to invoke the terminology of narrative theory-than life conducted under a regime of scarcity, insecurity, and need. In the works of these authors, literary characters steeped in good-life satisfactions are shown to cease to believe in the promise of happiness that economic good-life objects bear. "Narratives Wrecked by Success" studies the wide-ranging effects such good-life skepticism has on narrative form and on revised conceptions of the moneyed American good life.

Notes:

Ph. D. University of Pennsylvania 2015.

Department: Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.

Supervisor: Rita Barnard.

Includes bibliographical references.

OCLC:

948335664