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Unrestricted, What does the figure of the rugged cowboy have to do with effete high modernism? My dissertation responds to this question by uncovering the ties linking early twentieth-century Western novels by authors such as Owen Wister and Clarence Mulford to a series of modernist texts that likewise engage deeply entrenched frontier myths in a post-WWI context. Throughout the 1920s, notable modernist figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Ernest Hemingway, while striving to break with American literary tradition, simultaneously probed the residual mythic strands of frontier discourse that informed hugely popular cowboy stories such as Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy (1910). In responding to these works, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway sought to confront the problem of depicting the post-war American by synthesizing the cowboy -- an emblem of the nation's past -- with "modern" figures ranging from Hemingway's wounded, sexually impotent expatriate Jake Barnes to Cather's cowhand-turned-archeologist Tom Outland to Fitzgerald's ambiguously ethnic "nobody from nowhere" Jay Gatsby.; But the absorption of Western motifs into the canon of American modernist prose casts a long shadow, I argue, for it is the figure of the hero as he is conceived by the writers mentioned above that, by the 1950s and 60s, comes to define the image of the cowboy found not just in literature but in cinema. Just as post-WWI American fiction writers looked to the Western to help shape their modernism, post-WWII Western films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) likewise absorbed the idiosyncrasies of 1920s modernist experimentalism. As I argue, the filmic Western becomes over time more and more preoccupied with the modernist deconstruction of the hero. The modernist undoing of these tales of identity and nationhood haunt the Western, making it the crucial site not only for establishing what it means to be American but, thanks to this pa

Unrestricted, Domestic Topographies examines the nexus between gender identity and the material conditions of the nineteenth-century British home. A new kind of literary investigation, a "gender topography," allows for an examination of the intersection between struggles over shifting gender roles and identities, the cultural meaning of the home, and the representation of domestic space in the novel. Gender identity and domestic ideology are both produced by the material conditions of the middle-class house, but further, the very materiality and perception of domestic spaces changes as a result of reigning ideals of gender and home life. Chapter One begins by theorizing a new narrative development in the nineteenth century, a technique that produces a "narrative tour" of the house. Dickens' David Copperfield illustrates the way this tour enunciates gender identities and relations, forcing David to learn to read properly and perform gender within the context of various kinds of homes. For women, this performance of gender relies upon increasingly visible housekeeping activities. Chapter Two analyzes Austen's Emma and Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks, suggesting that as increasingly visible housekeeping activities became integral to middle-class identity, women developed new social and even political power through the management of their homes. This power, though, comes with the pressure to maintain a "proper" house in the face of its potential loss, and Chapter Three unpacks the core tension underlying the threat of domestic dispossession: for women like Anne Elliot in Austen's Persuasion, Maggie Tulliver in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, and Sue Bridehead in Hardy's Jude the Obscure, the Victorian home is both safe sanctuary and stifling prison. The project ends by analyzing the logical culmination of domestic anxiety: the haunted house story.; By reading these narratives as part of the realist tradition, instead of as Gothic or sensational literature, we can see that stories of haun