Pressured Identities explores the radical reconception of American individualism by major realist writers at the turn of the twentieth century. The individual as the source and standard of value lies at the core of America's liberal democratic ethos. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the figure of the autonomous individual no longer seemed tenable amid the overwhelming pressures of mass society—often represented as the ubiquitous urban crowd—that increasingly characterized national self-perception. Rather than advocating an outmoded definition of individuation by attempting futilely to resist the crowd, the authors upon whom this study focuses—Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton—offer a completely new vision of identity, by imagining that persons can be individuated, paradoxically, only by and through the crowd. They posit characters who transform anonymity into inimitability by embracing the very structures of mass society—tenements, consumerism, financial and literary markets—that would seem to deny individuation. Far from dissolving individuals into an indistinguishable mass, the crowd makes individuals of those who yield fully to its energies.; The dominant view of American realism as a narrative strategy of crowd management thus seems misplaced. Irrepressible crowds fill these texts, their potency necessitated by the newly imagined processes of identity formation. Narrative form emulates thematic content, as these writers exploit their crowd-like readership to secure for themselves an individual identity as author. While questions about individuation, crowd, and narrative are central to every text in this study, each author addresses them in very different terms. Separate chapters examine issues of privacy, visibility, and irony in Crane's Bowery sketches and The Monster; consumerism, desire, and narrator presence in Dreiser's Sister Carrie; speculation, autonomy, and narrative style in Norris's The Pit and literary criticism; publicity, celebrity, and authorship in Wharton's “Copy” and The Touchstone. Their radical strategies motivated by traditional impulses, these authors discover a way to affirm individuation within mass society that earlier nineteenth-century thought could not fathom and later twentieth-century rhetoric could not accommodate.
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机译：压力身份探索了二十世纪初主要现实主义者对美国个人主义的彻底重新认识。个人作为价值的来源和价值标准，是美国自由主义民主精神的核心。然而，到了19世纪末，在大众社会的压倒性压力下（通常被表示为无处不在的城市人群），自治个人的身材不再显得站得住脚，这日益成为国家自我认知的特征。与其提倡徒劳无益地抗拒人群，不提倡过分的个性化定义，本研究关注的作者斯蒂芬·克雷恩（Stephen Crane），西奥多·德雷塞（Theodore Dreiser），弗兰克·诺里斯（Frank Norris）和伊迪丝·沃顿（Edith Wharton）而是通过设想人们可以矛盾的是，只有人群中和人群中的人才能被个体化。他们认为，通过拥抱大众社会的结构（租赁，消费主义，金融和文学市场），这些人将匿名性转变为不可模仿性，这些结构似乎否认了个体化。人群并没有使个人变得难以区分，反而使那些完全屈服于其能量的人成为个人。因此，美国现实主义作为人群管理叙事策略的主流观点似乎放错了地方。不可阻挡的人群充斥着这些文本，它们的力量是新想象的身份形成过程所必需的。叙事形式模仿主题内容，因为这些作家利用像人群一样的读者群来确保自己作为作者的身份。尽管有关个性化，人群和叙述的问题对于本研究的每篇文章都是至关重要的，但每位作者都用截然不同的术语来解决它们。单独的章节探讨了Crane的Bowery草图和 The Monster 中的隐私，可见性和讽刺性问题； Dreiser的中的消费主义，欲望和叙述者的存在；诺里斯的《斜体》和文学批评中的推测，自治和叙事风格；沃顿商学院的“复制”和试金石中的宣传，名流和作者身份。这些作者以传统冲动为动力的激进策略，发现了一种在大众社会中确认个人化的方式，即十九世纪早期的思想无法接受，二十世纪后期的言辞无法适应。
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