This study develops a two-part definition of the suburban subgenre of American literature, based upon the perception of a break between nineteenth- and twentieth-century suburban texts. Unlike previous studies, mine surveys nineteenth-century fiction, discovering a general tendency to evaluate the emergent suburban space and culture as potentially inadequate for promoting white middle-class identity and social status. This concern can be traced back to the Victorian period’s rapid urban growth, industrialization, foreign immigration, and proletarianization—factors that resulted in a destabilized class structure and increased economic as well as social competition. In suburban fiction of this era, a typical character, recently arrived from the city, is dismayed by the difficulties of suburban housekeeping, the lack of genteel society and urban conveniences, the opportunity that rural leisure provides for misadventures, and the potential for shame through interactions with the rural working class. I propose that the subgenre’s first phase is characterized by a theme of indistinction, signifying an inscrutability as well as an inability to provide the desired social status.

The second phase, in contrast, is distinguished by a dominant theme of irony, which evolves in response to the increasingly tight association of twentieth-century suburbia with white middle-class identity. No longer is discontent principally oriented toward the suburbs’ perceived failures. Instead, the problems portrayed in many twentieth-century suburban novels can be interpreted as the unintended consequences or side effects of suburbia’s very success at creating an exclusive, respectable, thoroughly middle-class social geography. These problems include the collapse of the bourgeois intimate sphere, the emergence of a minimalistic social order characterized by conflict avoidance and disengaged tolerance, and the spread of suburban sprawl. The irony structuring these texts is the most distinguishing and provocative characteristic of the twentieth-century suburban novel. My multidisciplinary dissertation thus provides a new account of the development of a literary genre and, in doing so, also reconfigures established ideas about the American suburbs.