Islands of the Plain: Pursuing Utopia in the Fictional Small Town

This dissertation examines the frontier fictional small town as a utopian space across a diverse American canon. With “no-place” and island-like qualities reminiscent of literary utopian settings, the fictional frontier small town is uniquely positioned to negotiate the ideals of the nation, and American writers have taken notice. Countless American writers have engaged with the setting to interrogate and complicate American utopian master narratives distilled in the space. In establishing the shared attributes of utopian and small-town fiction, I posit this setting as the definitive utopian space of American literature and position this collective presentation as evidence of an ongoing, fruitless search for an American Utopia that was promised. I map this recurring setting in the work of Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich to initiate the creation of an iconography of fictional towns, which speaks to the layered utopian discourse present in the space. I then trace how historically marginalized groups navigate and are manipulated by America’s quintessential utopian form, examining the race, gender, labor, and sexual politics that unfold therein. As a result of this analysis, I look to create a model of the fictional small-town space which can be used as an analytical and interpretive tool for countless other works of small-town fiction.