Abstract

Novel Ideas: U.S. Feminist Literary Pragmatism is a literary history that seeks to recover the significance of female fiction writers in the intellectual history of American pragmatism. This dissertation argues that women writers did pragmatist public philosophy in the form of literary art, especially the novel, in the early 20th century United States, investing in epistemic inquiry, social reform, and aesthetic production as joint endeavors. It establishes feminist literary pragmatism as a framework to integrate and center women, especially women of color, in literary pragmatist studies and offer a fruitful angle of approach to writers who fit uneasily into existing literary historical narratives. To feminist pragmatist scholarship, it suggests new avenues for recovery by illuminating contexts for pragmatism’s established canon, suggesting figures to consider for inclusion, and offering new sites from which further work may begin. At the cross-disciplinary juncture of feminist and literary pragmatist studies, with a grounding in John Dewey’s social and aesthetic theory, Novel Ideas argues that feminist literary pragmatists used literature as a tool to mediate between lived and learned experiences and especially to elevate female perspectives that might unsettle the received patriarchal “wisdom” of their day. It proposes that defining themes of this movement include: interest in reintegrating gendered binaries of rationality and affect; consideration of how to balance the relationship between individualism and communitarianism; commitment to literature as an important agent for social change paired with defense of the aesthetic potential of socially engaged art; and effort to motivate informed, independent thinking in readers by modeling experiences of self-reflective thought, staging discussion of social issues, and scrutinizing the psychological conditions and processes involved in changing one’s mind. Formally, it finds that feminist literary pragmatism is a multi-genre phenomenon with a weight toward prose narrative. Chapter One begins with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a consensus figure in feminist pragmatism with abundant writing in both theory-as-such and literature-as-theory, to set the stage for approaching other writers. It examines a series of articles published between 1908 and 1915 and two utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911) and Herland (1915), to distill Gilman’s theoretical defense of literary pluralism, provide a model of feminist literary praxis, and establish interest in processes of social change as mental change as a jumping off point. Chapter Two reconsiders Jewish American writer Anzia Yezierska’s well-known relationship with John Dewey by examining their writings side-by-side. It argues that Dewey’s poems suggest Yezierska’s influence on his thinking about affect and literature; elucidates the intellectual substance of her engagement of Dewey’s ideas in All I Could Never Be (1932), “Prophets of Democracy” (1920), “America and I” (1922) and “A Thousand Pages of Research” (1963); and introduces the new context of a previously unstudied poetic connection through Robert Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” Chapter Three stakes a claim for Jessie Redmon Fauset as a Black feminist pragmatist public intellectual, considering her relationships with Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois, and defining her aesthetic of literary empiricism by way of her critical exchange with sociologist Edward B. Reuter regarding his study The Mulatto in the United States (1918). Chapter Four offers a feminist literary pragmatist reading of Fauset’s best-known novel, arguing that Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral (1929) models an amoral personal transformation and demonstrates the political significance of a mutually reinforcing relationship between ethics and aesthetics.