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dc.contributor.advisorErisman, Fred
dc.contributor.authorNichols, Michael Daneen_US
dc.date.accessioned2019-10-11T15:10:30Z
dc.date.available2019-10-11T15:10:30Z
dc.date.created1997en_US
dc.date.issued1997en_US
dc.identifieraleph-760574en_US
dc.identifierMicrofilm Diss. 685.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/32700
dc.description.abstractThis study reassesses the American literary pastoralism that is the subject of Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and disagrees with Marx about the nature and function of recurrent portrayals of the conflict between the "machine" and the "garden." The Pastoral of the American Way began as a method of dramatizing the political and social theory of the eighteenth-century liberalism that informs the primary political documents of American society. Far from being a static body of beliefs and attitudes, this liberalism has inherent philosophical and political tensions, a condition that insures both dissent and assent within the same ideological framework as well as conceptual differences over time. This liberalism derives from Locke's social contract theory and is what many have named the "American Way." Locke's state of nature setting encouraged the development of a pastoralism that dramatizes the American Way. Following Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner, the Pastoral of the American Way is a dynamic ideological system of myths and symbols that makes an autonomous politics possible and which serves as a ritual process. The Pastoral of the American Way functions as what Kenneth Burke calls a "terministic screen" that selects and deflects "reality." Drawing on the work of Sacvan Bercovitch, this study argues that the Pastoral of the American Way functions as a jeremiad transformed for a secular, Lockean society. The Pastoral of the American Way plays a vital and constructive role in evaluating and transforming American liberalism in the years between the First and Second World Wars. During this period, the imagery of the Pastoral of the American Way is explicitly associated with the label of American liberalism, and both are used to signal the "true" meaning of America. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, Louis Bromfield's The Farm, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath use pastoral practices to comment on the status of American liberalism, and parallel the writings of such public intellectuals and figures as Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Henry Adams, and Frederick Winslow Taylor.
dc.format.extentiv, 302 leavesen_US
dc.format.mediumFormat: Printen_US
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.relation.ispartofTexas Christian University dissertationen_US
dc.relation.ispartofAS38.N52en_US
dc.subject.lcshLiberalism in literatureen_US
dc.subject.lcshLiberalism--United States--History--20th centuryen_US
dc.subject.lcshPolitics and literature--United Statesen_US
dc.subject.lcshTechnology--Social aspects--United Statesen_US
dc.titleThe pastoral of the American way in the technological society: liberalism in transition, 1922-1939en_US
dc.typeTexten_US
etd.degree.departmentDepartment of English
etd.degree.levelDoctoral
local.collegeAddRan College of Liberal Arts
local.departmentEnglish
local.academicunitDepartment of English
dc.type.genreDissertation
local.subjectareaEnglish
dc.identifier.callnumberMain Stacks: AS38 .N52 (Regular Loan)
dc.identifier.callnumberSpecial Collections: AS38 .N52 (Non-Circulating)
etd.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy
etd.degree.grantorTexas Christian University


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