Spanning Spaces: The Spatial Perception of New York in Hart Crane's 'The Bridge', Lola Ridge's 'The Ghetto', John Dos Passos' 'Manhattan Transfer', and James Baldwin's 'Another Country'

The following thesis explores the ways in which spatial perceptions function in the urban modernist literature of New York in the early to mid-twentieth century, using primary texts by Hart Crane, Lola Ridge, John Dos Passos, and James Baldwin. By employing a theoretical framework based on concepts by David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, the thesis explores how these four writers portray the material realities of life in the city, and how they imbue the physical infrastructure of New York with symbolism, using the urban space as a means to discuss both the city's, and the nation's, place in the modern world.

This research makes a methodological intervention in understanding American modernism, highlighting the importance of space and spatial perception to close reading these works, and how their depictions of New York and its physical infrastructure, particularly bridges, are closely related. The thesis covers a large span of time, beginning in 1918 and ending in 1962, but this extensive timeframe offers an important insight into how New York's literary representations chart the oscillating nature of America's national identity throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

The thesis is structured thematically: the first two chapters focus on poetry that broadly characterises New York as a space full of optimistic potential, whilst the third and fourth chapters consider novels with a more pessimistic outlook on both the city and the country. Chapter 1 looks at Hart Crane's epic modernist poem The Bridge (1930) and discusses how Crane portrays the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of 'wholeness', and how he equates relationships between spaces with spiritual idealism. Chapter 2 explores how Lola Ridge's poem 'The Ghetto' (1918) similarly views New York through an optimistic lens, but by focusing on the Jewish ghettos of the Lower East Side and its inhabitants, she identifies an embryonic American political culture that she predicts will spread across the city and beyond.

By exploring John Dos Passos' depiction of New York in the novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), chapter 3 contends with how twentieth-century industrial capitalism makes the city an inescapable and apocalyptic space. Chapter 4 turns to James Baldwin's novel Another Country (1962) and how it similarly represents New York as a hopeless space, but specifically for its black population. However, Baldwin's relationship with liberalism means that he still manages to harbour hope that the city, its inhabitants, and the country, can change and embody the idealistic principles communicated by Crane and Ridge.

Fundamentally, this thesis demonstrates that considering the spatial perceptions of New York in these four twentieth-century texts provides important insights into the texts themselves, but also the role New York plays in representing America and its place within modernity.