Arguing Their World: The Representation of Major Social and Cultural Issues in Edna Ferber's and Fannie Hurst's Fiction, 1910-1935

摘要

Between the early decades of the twentieth-century and mid-century, Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst were popular and prolific authors of fiction about American society and culture. Almost a century ago, they were writing about race, immigration, economic disparity, drug addiction, and other issues our society is dealing with today with a renewed sense of urgency. In spite of their extraordinary popularity, by the time they died within a few months of each other in 1968, their reputations had fallen into eclipse. This dissertation focuses on Ferber's and Hurst's fiction published between approximately 1910 and 1935, the years in which both authors enjoyed the highest critical and popular esteem. Perhaps because these realistic narratives generally do not engage in the stylistic experimentation of the literary world around them, literary scholars came to undervalue their work. My close readings and consideration of secondary socio-political sources establish the importance of this body of fiction as a reflection of and influence on social issues of their day, with contemporary reverberations. The social and cultural issues with which the authors are concerned include cultural diversity in Ferber's Cimarron (1929), her representation of the increasing homogenization of American culture in Show Boat (1926), and the association of her intensely visual writing style with the historical mural cycles of Thomas Hart Benton in her early regional novels. Hurst's equally wide-ranging concerns include representation of the rise-and-fall of German-American culture; food insecurity, weight, and non-standard body type in narratives about cultural assimilation and acceptance of diversity; the impact of the 1920s opioid epidemic on upper-middle-class families, and her modernist experiment in Lummox (1923), in which she combines a realistic social-justice narrative calling for the equitable treatment of domestic workers with a modernist narrative that describes an inarticulate woman's search for self-expression through music. Through this work of recovery and restoration, I strive to demonstrate that through the characters who populate their fiction and the personal and societal issues they confront, Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst are still speaking to us---and that there is much to learn from them.