Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies by James E. Dobson (review)

James E. Dobson's Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary Representations of Communication and Transportation Technologies takes on an ambitious project, attempting to connect the rise of rapid travel and communication technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with changes in both the form and purpose of the American autobiography. Further, Dobson interrogates the role of detachment, an Enlightenment era ideal and emblem of the realist narrative perspective, as it is used in the self-reflections of autobiographical works by Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry Adams. Individual chapters on each of these writers make up the core of the text, following two chapters that establish a theoretical framework. The first chapter surveys the turn from the traditional linear progressive view of American history, reinforced by notions such as Leo Marx's "complex pastoralism," to the recognition of multiple perspectives that accompanied the rise of the modernist movement in the early twentieth century (5–6), setting the stage for Dobson's argument that American autobiographies registered ambivalence about the dominant narrative of progress. The second chapter takes up the question of detachment as a philosophical concept with both positive and negative valences that evolves to become a tool for narrative perspective in the realism movement. Philosophical detachment is then juxtaposed with the disruptions in nineteenth-century American life—the Civil War, economic upheaval, forced migration—that created literal detachment from past homes for many Americans. This discussion becomes the vehicle for introducing the examination of the homecoming travel narrative as a specific type of autobiography.

Dobson's focus on personal, return-home narratives is a strength of his work. Dobson notes that homecoming narratives were popular in fin-de-siècle America, and he further contextualizes these plots with the economic realities of the time. Forced mobility due to economic need or other types of displacement, rapid urbanization, and the boom and bust of the Gilded Age meant that many lost their homes. His engagement with these narratives of a lost past, particularly in an American culture that did not seem to value the past, is a powerful contribution to life writing. Dobson's work highlights the varied responses to this loss by James and Dreiser. Both writers utilize a detached third person perspective in their autobiographical works, and both are frustrated in their quest to recover a sense of the past because of the loss of physical homes that they seek to revisit. In these failures, Dobson locates modern disruption, and he analyzes the use of detachment by each author as a way of coping with this failure. For James, detachment signifies "a removal from the relentless growth and systemization of modernization run amok" (52), while Dreiser's detachment allows him to identify moments of repetition between past and present that Dobson aligns with "one's true home … a cosmic temporality of eternal repetition" (76). In these two chapters, Dobson presents the most forceful version of his argument about the use of autobiography as a means of grappling with modernization in an attempt to create a coherent identity between the present and past self.

Another strength of Dobson's analysis is his discussion of the rise of modernity as a disruptive force, and, through this examination of disruption, Dobson most clearly explores travel and communication technologies. For example, as travel technologies enabled swift movement across the country, more people were able to make that return journey home. However, when travelers who journeyed towards an idealized past arrived and confronted the reality of the lost home, they felt a sense of disruption and even disorientation, and the personal temporality connecting the present to the past may have remained uncomfortably incomplete. Travel technologies as instruments of this increased mobility are therefore important to the analysis. However, Dobson does not address in much detail the specific representations of these technologies. For example, James...