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Where it's at [electronic resource] : the making of setting in American fiction from Mississippi to Mars

This dissertation shows how the narrative variable of setting becomes increasingly significant to the American novel throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Along with advances in transportation and communication, new patterns of immigration, the emergence of global capitalism, and the environmental crisis have influenced representations of fictional space, thus bringing historical fact and aesthetic practice into close association during the period of my study. I argue that these unprecedented changes in the American experience of place have led to technical innovations in literary setting, from the focalization of space through multiple narrators to the compression of geographic distance into a single paragraph of text. As it stands, there are surprisingly few studies devoted to setting as a narratological category, and this dissertation operates across several genres, including the modernist and postmodernist novel, science fiction, and the geopolitical thriller, in order to answer key questions about setting.