Framing the Citizen: Constructing Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century Anglo-American Literary and Social Discourse

The first decades of the twentieth century leading up to World War II were a time of profound demographic transformation in Great Britain and America, a time when many peoplewriters and artists includedbegan questioning the principles upon which their so-called "democratic" nations were built. It was also a time when governments began forging certain understandings of citizenship that benefitted the national interest. This dissertation analyzes a diverse group of politically engaged, Anglo-American, Modernist writers of fiction, poetry, prose, non-fiction, and social documentary, all of whom contested the ways in which, during this period, the concept of the citizen was being framed in national, legal, and socio-political discourse. Among the works examined are: Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907); Joyce's Ulysses (1922); Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903) and The American Scene (1905); poet Mina Loy's "Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose" (1923); Virginia Woolf's The Years (1937); Auden's (selected poems of the 1930s); Richard Wright's Native Son (1940); as well as writer/journalist James Agee and documentary photographer Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Pericles Lewis has characterized the period as a time of crisisa "crisis of representation." For Modernist writers the crisis was not only political, it involved a crisis of representation in the aesthetic sensean apparent collapse of faith in conventional artistic means of representing a world which had drastically changed. This dissertation maps political modernism against/alongside cultural/literary Modernism to advance the argument that the concurrent crises of representation were not merely coincidental but rather correlative in deep and complex ways. It proposes that these writers highly innovative aesthetic projects were inextricably intertwined with their respective projects to dismantle seemingly dangerous and deceptive, politically motivated arguments about nationalism and citizenship. Grounded in the critical theories of Michel Foucault and his investigations of power, this dissertation interrogates the agendas and mechanisms by which the "received knowledge" of a society comes to be produced. Close readings of the literary texts show how Modernist writers absorb, narrativize, and attempt to disrupt these discursive processes. Throughout, the question of art's influence and relationship to power is a central concern.