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Abstract
This dissertation examines responses of ethnic writers to the social and demographic pressures created by the "New" immigration (1890-1924). Focusing primarily on immigrant autobiography and fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, the study explores how immigrants and their children claim cultural citizenship during a time marked by growing economic disparities, anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation and also the emergence of cultural pluralism and consensus politics. The study argues that aspiring Americans adapt and transform the habits of Anglo-American culture and differentiate themselves from other ethnic Americans as strategies of compensation, resilience and empowerment.
Chapter 1 focuses on the Russian-Jewish writer Mary Antin and the debate over the melting pot. Antin made a strong case for open immigration while distinguishing herself as an American insider. Chapter 2 examines Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925) and Michael Seide's The Common Thread (stories published in the 1930S and collected in 1944) to show how failures and frustrations in the Promised Land create a righteous indignation against an earlier generation that doesn't seem to live up to the mythical standards of America. Chapter 3 considers F. Scott Fitzgerald as an ethnic writer and his depictions of American dreamers trying to overcome a lingering provincialism and participating in various forms of cultural hazing. Chapter 4 examines Younghill Kang's East Goes West, The Making of an Oriental Yankee, (1937), Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete (1939), and Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1946). Each of these narratives portrays dramatic intolerance and suffering, but the protagonists distinguish themselves (often from other ethnics) as sensitive spokesmen or ironic arbiters of the American experience. Chapter 5 explores the dynamics of ethnic competition and territoriality in O. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth (1927), Louis Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle (1932) and James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932, 1933, 1934).
This dissertation directs attention to the often misperceived exclusion among and within ethnic groups in America. Further, it argues for a nuanced multiculturalism, one that accounts more fully for ethnic conflict as well as the give-and-take relationship between the "mainstream" and "margins" of American life.