简介

PhD, University of Virginia, 1985 My principal area of interest is how Americans forged cultural and intellectual responses to a social life shaped by a dynamic capitalism. I have investigated the links between a form of expressive culture (literary realism and naturalism) and industrial life in Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. My next book, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity: American Thought and Culture, 1900 − 1920, explored the ways in which many Americans at the beginning of the twentieth-century rejected or could not accept the validity of long-standing unifying synthesis. In the a wide variety of discourses and practices, I maintained, the impetus for cultural and intellectual life came from those who stressed the many, the particular, and the local as a central assumption in explanation and interpretation. In These United States, a collection of articles written expressly for The Nation in the 1920s which I edited and for which I wrote an introduction, I was concerned to understand how Americans understood diversity in the face of what were thought to be overwhelming forces of standardization and uniformity of mass culture and a national market.