Tracing the corporation: The cultural imagination of business in American literary realism, 1865--1917.

If one were to write a history of the United States through an extended reading of its literatures, business would loom large as a powerful force in the deep structures of people's imaginations. If one were to write the same history through an extended reading of literary criticism, business would seem to lightly brush the surface of American experience, a begrudging footnote or oft-ignored appendix to more gripping dramas. No form of American business has been more influential than the corporation. The corporate form started the nineteenth century as one of many forms organizing economic activity, limited in scope, scale, duration, and purpose; it closed the same century as the preeminent expression of business, national in scope, unlimited in scale, effectively immortal, and malleable of purpose. This dissertation traces the influence of an economic form of collective action on American culture, through a study of the American novel. The novel served as the preeminent form of storytelling during the moments when the cultural revolution of the corporate form was still conspicuously incomplete. The assumptions of literary realism---that the author has a responsibility to reflect the social world accurately; that this world should be crafted through a myriad of concrete and factual details established under a significant order; that these details should be perceived and revealed through psychologically coherent characters---made it an irresistible fit for writers grappling with the new social experiences presented by the corporation after the Civil War. In tracing the ways in which writers imagined business in this time period, my purpose in this dissertation is two-fold: to understand better the interplay between business and literary history in the United States, and to use this interplay to interrogate how the corporation as content influenced the form of the novel.PhDAmerican literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126951/2/3287587.pd