Minor Details: Tracing the Radical Potential of Minor Characters and Their Narrative Dynamics Through Urban Spaces of Early Twentieth-Century American Novels

Author

Emily M. Harrison, University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleFollow

Date of Award

8-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Bill Hardwig

Committee Members

Katy Chiles, Lisi Schoenbach, Robert Bland

Abstract

Minor characters are by definition at odds with the narrative structure. The tension between their potential and their limited access to agentive narrative articulation draws our attention to the relationship between an individual and the systems and structures that they exist within. Focusing on minor characterization dynamics, “Minor Details” centers Black feminist theory within a study of narrative form to try to widen approaches to close reading and examinations of narrative form to expand and refocus conversations about early twentieth-century American novels that decenter traditional problematic structural approaches to reading these texts. The readings featured in this dissertation emphasize the significance of formal constructions of wayward, fugitive, precarious, and minorized Black women characters written by Black American authors in the American city spaces of early twentieth-century novels and explore formal revolutionary relationships between these marginalized characters and the narrative structures and logics in which they are contained.

Recommended Citation

Harrison, Emily M., "Minor Details: Tracing the Radical Potential of Minor Characters and Their Narrative Dynamics Through Urban Spaces of Early Twentieth-Century American Novels. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2025.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/12716