Modernism’s Others: Literary Realisms in an Age of Incomplete Emancipation

Abstract

Modernism’s Others explores how a transformation in traditions of realist representation laid the grounds for the emergence of the multicultural and avant-garde constructions of modern American literature. At the heart of this investigation is the way the “right to privacy” articulated at the end of the nineteenth century reshaped visions of separate spheres, differential rights, and public duties. It examines a moment at which writers placed, at the heart of literature’s ethics and its epistemology, the right to not be known. Tracing the career of this idea from its roots in late nineteenth-century realism through the emerging canons of modernist and multicultural literature, this project explores the interplay between new categories of legal right, new categories of social analysis, and new measures of literary value. “Selling somebody out” slouches into American literature, more or less, on the heels of Bartley Hubbard.