Index to American Quarterly Volume 55 March 2003 to December 2003

Alicia Barber, "Living It Up, Living It Down: Civic Reputation, Tourism, and Urban Development in Reno, Nevada." University of Texas, Austin, May 2003.

This dissertation examines the relationship between the civic reputation and the cultural landscape of Reno, Nevada from its founding in 1868 to the present. Drawing on a diverse array of materials including promotional literature, city directories, oral histories, periodicals, film, fiction, and architecture, I examine the formation of Reno's national reputation as a divorce capital and gambling mecca in conjunction with the development in of its city center. Always accompanying the desire of various local business interests to capitalize on market demands for legal freedoms, vice, and titillation was the corresponding desire of other residents to overcome that reputation through assertions of the city's respectability, livability, and normality. Accordingly, each side aspired to create, and to preserve, a landscape that reflected its vision of Reno. The relationship between Reno's civic reputation and its cultural landscape has been clearly reciprocal, with the national reputation influencing the symbolic economy of the landscape, and that landscape in turn inspiring fluctuations in the city's outward reputation for better and for worse. In examining Reno's entire historical development, I am able to trace the continuities and controversies regarding the city's architectural heritage, place promotion, tourist industry, and residential sense of place. In doing so, I connect nineteenth-century boosterism to late twentieth-century place marketing, considering the shifts in Reno's reputation with respect to changing American cultural values, biases, and stereotypes about divorce, gambling and the American West itself.

Avent Beck, "Civil War Veterans in the Fiction of Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, and Henry James." New York University, May 2003.

Samuel Clemens, Henry Adams, William Dean Howells and Henry James matured as writers in the later nineteenth century, but they also belonged to the Civil War generation, as did many in their audiences. When they included a Civil War veteran in a tale or novel, they called attention to a familiar historical figure. This veteran is more than a biographical nuance. Under normal exercise of his author's and readers' imaginations, this character's identity gathers historical depth and perspective, the past enters his contemporary setting and with it an expectation, maybe, of parable on the theme of history. The Civil War veterans in Clemens's Lucretia Smith's Soldier, The Gilded Age and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; in Howells's A Foregone Conclusion, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes; in Adams's Democracy and Esther; and in James's The Story of a Year, Poor Richard, A Most Extraordinary Year, The American and The Bostonians, are not only significantly developed as veterans, they also are major characters or even the main character himself. In these stories we are led, through these veterans, to regard historical and literary approaches to modernity, a sense that fidelity to reality cuts self-consciousness off from its historical past. One complication is that because the past propagated the war, the past is responsible for the modernity that was an unintended consequence of the war. In one way or another, the war was a revelation of irony, error, blindness and the terrible force of natural change. The veterans carry this cultural news, whether or not they realize it or want to. Given this popular subject matter and these well-known authors, it is counterintuitive yet true that these narrative investments in Civil War veterans are rarely paid attention to in commentaries.

Steven J. Belluscio, "To Be Suddenly White: Realism and the Problem of Agency in U.S. Passing Narratives." Purdue University, May 2003.

Chapter one provides a historical and critical overview of passing and the three ethnic groups discussed in the dissertation: African Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans. Chapter two offers readings of Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty, both of which are taken to be early examples of realist passing narratives. The chapter concludes...