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Progressive Saxonism: The Construction Of Anglo-Saxonism In Jack London's The Valley Of The Moon And Frank Norris's Mcteague, Matthew John Soderblom

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of my thesis seeks to uncover the constructed nature of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity within two works of fiction. My thesis utilizes London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Norris’s McTeague (1899) because they were published in a similar era. Both authors lived and wrote in the Bay Area during the Progressive Era of American politics. Therefore, there is political, stylistic, and regional proximity. Although Anglo-Saxonism has always been present in the United States, the construction of race was changing in the 1900s. The Valley of the Moon and McTeague both contain intriguing (and antiquated) notions of whiteness …