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Dissertation Information for Karen S. Kimball

NAME:
- Karen S. Kimball

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1996)

ADVISORS:
- Allen Tullos

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Inspected

Title: "The curious vagaries of visionaries": A history of the American future, 1880s-1910s

Abstract: Over two hundred works of futurian literature were published in the United States from the 1880s into the 1910s. These works both questioned and affirmed the nation's direction and revealed a willingness to reevaluate a long-standing American sense of destiny. Although the philosophic legacies of millennialism, republicanism, and Enlightenment thought embraced notions of progress and futurity which had informed the nation's culture since its inception, the nature of this intense fin-de-siecle self-scrutiny suggests a change in American self-perception. This dissertation will examine the formation of literary futurists and assess the cultural significance of the futurian phenomenon in light of that change.

A general time-consciousness and a sense of urgency seemed to pervade American society during the period. Expanding technology, rapid industrialization, and unchecked urban growth also contributed to a growing spiritual malaise. Within this context, an America of another time supplanted the notion of utopia or dystopia as another place for the nation's futurists. This shift in perspective also placed the nation in the ironic and untenable position of permanent liminality; continually on the verge of fulfilling or denying its destiny. It was from this perspective that Edward Bellamy, a moderate literary socialist; Ignatius Donnelly, a populist; Benjamin Flower, a reforming editor and spiritualist; Josiah Strong, a Protestant minister and Social Gospeller; and their fellow writers speculated on the future of their country. Revealed within those speculations were comments on the troubling themes of the period: tensions between labor and capital, race and ethnicity, the "woman problem," concepts of morality and progress, happiness and justice, and the perceived failures of political and religious institutions.

Caught on the cusp of modernity, Americans of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries expressed their hopes and distress in a wide variety of speculative, even prescriptive, literature. By focusing on the temporal distance, these individuals could address seemingly insurmountable social and economic problems within an environment they both created and controlled. For those convinced of the efficacy of their plans, this temporal reconception was an opportunity to create a new world--a culture of the future. This thesis will explicate that culture, the competing social and political proposals futurian writers advanced, and the issues they found both daunting and solvable.

MPACT Scores for Karen S. Kimball

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C = 0
A+C = 0
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TA = 0
calculated 2008-03-31 12:20:48

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Students under Karen S. Kimball

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None