Novel ambitions: Four early Jewish-American writers and their professional formation.

During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many Jews emerged from the Lower East Side to stake a claim in the field of American letters as novelists, poets, and intellectuals. My dissertation examines the professional development of three of these individuals---Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry Roth---and asks a question largely overlooked in the field of Jewish-American studies: why would a poor, non-native-speaking immigrant pursue an economically risky career as a writer?Adapting Pierre Bourdieu's cultural insights, I set aside the romantic paradigms of authorship and try to explore the professional origins of Jewish-American writing by situating it within a nexus of social and cultural relationships. I contend that Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth were acutely aware of the economic pitfalls that came with being a writer but argue that for each author cultural advancement possessed a "redemptive" potential unavailable simply through economic achievement. Throughout this dissertation I explore the various ways these authors demonstrate their mastery of English in an attempt to distance themselves from the Yiddish-speaking masses and join an elite group of American writers.I contrast the professional ambitions of these immigrant authors to those of the Anglo-American writer Henry Harland, who, during the 1880s, produced a series of "philo-semitic" novels under the pseudonym Sidney Luska. Not only did these novels claim to provide a window into the Jewish world, Harland selected the name Luska to convince readers that their author was himself a Jew. But, I argue, these books have little to do with Jews; rather, they are borne out of a set of aristocratic cultural and social values that denigrated realism's mimetic codes. The way Harland utilizes Jewish characters to articulate these values is central to my analysis of his literary development.Ultimately, I contend, each author's career was shaped by social and cultural desires that were so pressing they inevitably made their way into his/her literary work. A good deal of this dissertation, therefore, is devoted to demonstrating how these early Jewish-American narratives-in their various stylistic and formal manifestations-may be read as allegories that encode the deepest professional concerns of their authors.Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of New York, 2003.School code: 0046