Fringe Realism

This dissertation puts forth a methodology of reading realism that emerges from the histories of materiality in fiction. The central concern of this dissertation lies in rethinking hermeneutic practices of close reading, asking what might happen when we read for historical materiality instead of a literary explanation. Fringe Realism plays on the metaphor of diffraction or interference fringes in optical physics. It argues that we can follow moments of narrative confusion, which have historically defied stable by turning to registers of materiality and scenes of material labor. Each chapter reads through historical material systems: biomimicry and mimicry systems in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857); metallurgy and metalworking in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861); and commerce and trade in Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1927). Instead of trying to explain these perplexing texts in terms of historical, generic categories like realism, modernism, and post-modernism, this dissertation follows the logic put forth by the narrative itself and, in doing so, hopes to rethink the boundaries of literary realism and its companion term mimesis. Fringe Realism proposes a methodology of reading realism that seeks to follow formal interactions on the page as if formed by processes of materiality and material production.