The aerial view was widely democratized prior to commercial flight. This media archaeology details the practice of terrestrial aerial views presented as cartographic spectacles in the long nineteenth century. The project considers panorama paintings that reproduced the view from above; models of cities that served as proxies for a balloon view; observation rides that provided slow-moving, elevated vistas of cities; as well as the public’s first encounter with the airplane. Although these bird’s-eye art forms have largely been forgotten, this project resurrects these lacunae as “aeroscopics.” Aeroscopics fundamentally skew the epistemology of the cartographic: time slows, scale shifts, and what was a quality of observation becomes instead intoxication.

This dissertation examines the Norwegian literary culture of the 1890s, a decade often described with labels such as nyromantikken [neo-romanticism] and decadence. Rather than perpetuating the conventional literary-historical narrative that the foremost literature of the 1890s represented an absolute break with literary naturalism, I show that naturalist materialism persisted, even as the literary optic was shifted from the realm of social realism to a representation of the inner forces at work within the modern individual. Combined with materialism, this shift in focus from the external to the internal realm resulted in the crucial concept of the embodied soul, a seemingly contradictory combination of ideal and the material that I argue was characteristic of this literary generation. Looking forward to the form of literary and artistic vitalism that became central in Scandinavian culture after the turn of the century, I show how this tendency toward vitalism actually began with the depiction of the material soul in the literature of the 1890s.

Using three canonical authors as case studies, this dissertation examines how and why scientific materialism became combined with a vitalist interest in invisible natural forces toward the end of the century. Knut Hamsun, who was a brash young literary provocateur at the outset of the decade, depicted the individual soul as an embodied phenomenon that manifested itself in basic physiological functions, as well as in the momentary workings of the individual mind. Hamsun also made sensory perception a topic of debate, critiquing the way in which vision was commonly deployed in ways that implied objectivity, disembodiment, and distance; hearing, on the other hand, Hamsun depicted as an immediate and subjective mode that adhered much more closely to his preference for vital embodiment over detached objectivism. Arne Garborg, a much more well-established author and intellectual at the time, focused on the conflicts between science and religion that arose around 1890, and showed how a new kind of idealism informed all manner of cultural pursuits. Spiritualism was of particular interest for Garborg, in part because of the way in which it reflected a contemporary tendency toward “re-enchantment.” Sigbjørn Obstfelder also focused on the relationship between religion and science, and showed how the scientific expansion of vision—achieved through technologies such as microscopes, telescopes, and the X-ray—was redirecting religious energies into a more scientifically-based search for the invisible forces that shape the universe and populate the earth with life. Obstfelder depicted a kind of vitalist “conversion narrative,” revealing how scientific naturalism was a necessary precursor to the shifting terms of religious devotion in the modern era, from the transcendent power of God to the immanent, life-giving force of the sun.

In all of these cases, vitalism grew out of a fixation on the invisible. Since previously invisible phenomena had become “visible” through the mediation of modern visual technologies, there was a broad sense that there were material forces at work beyond the visual horizon. Scientific naturalism was thus a necessary precursor to vitalism, because it provided a sense that there were undiscovered natural forces at work all around us and within us. Vitalism simultaneously critiqued the disembodiment and detachment that scientific vision was predicated upon, however, and instead advocated for a fully embodied mode of investigating and experiencing the vital force.

This dissertation addresses depictions of the first phase of the ongoing “War on Terror” (2001-2013). By focusing on the three narrative figures around which such media representations center—the journalist, the soldier, and the veteran—I examine the genres and modes that shape how the United States population tells itself stories about war and compare the reach and impact of different media forms, analyzing, for example, the disparity between YouTube videos with millions of hits and feature-film box office flops. “War on Terror” narratives raise critical ethical and moral issues around the mechanization of warfare, the global reach of American culture, and the impossibility of perpetual war, most clearly within individual media narratives that are too easily obscured by the framework of the larger media landscape. By re-sorting the films, television shows, and online videos that directly depict the “War on Terror” and grouping them by their central narrative figures, the narrative conventions repeated across media forms are more easily identified. For the journalist, I look to documentary modes to better understand the blurring of fact and fiction and the loss of appeal to journalistic objectivity. For the soldier, I dissect ideas about technologically enhanced contemporary vision in warfare, considering the telescopic views of very close and very far. And finally, for the veteran, I look to the melodramatic mode to understand the inversion of contemporary (failed) reintegration narratives. The project culminates in the uncomfortable conclusion that the United States does not yet know how to handle its traumatized and injured veterans, nor the reminder of the unpopular and amoebic war they represent. On the whole, my project critically examines the American public’s simultaneous fascination with and dissociation from the war, and our inability to deal with its legacy today. Ultimately, this project proposes that, while the narrative conventions bestow unifying legibility to the fragmented representations and a continuity in storytelling that affirms the United States as democratizing “good guys,” those narrative conventions ultimately serve to mask the fracturing and loss of a unifying mythology of American national identity. While these divisions grow more apparent daily, the divides seen today trace much further back, and are seen clearly in this project of analyzing media representations of the first phase of the “War on Terror.”

Modernism is often conceived as a radical break from tradition and a turn towards the interior.These critical orthodoxies draw on myriad images of outsiderness and non-belonging deployed by modernist authors across genres and traditions in interwar Europe. Yet these anti-social tropes are circulated intertextually, rendering them markedly social. My dissertation, entitled Text of Kin— Utopian Intertextuality Between Finland and Sweden in Interwar Literature, asks how we can account for these bonds between texts that otherwise advertise their own isolation. Approaching the question from the perspective of the often neglected yet pioneering moment of Scandinavian modernism, I trace the intertextual constellations that emerge between Finland’s and Sweden’s literary traditions, reflecting the former’s negotiation of its national identity in relation to its former ruler, as well as the broader modernist investment in the question of (anti- )tradition. My project establishes that the intertextually invoked space of poetry itself becomes the site of identification for modernist poets.

My dissertation makes three interrelated methodological contributions that resonate beyondthe particular cultural constellation of Scandinavian modernism. First, I demonstrate how an intertextual model of utopian empathy emerges through these conversations, challenging the notion of modernism as inward facing and radically breaking with the past. Second, I propose a correction of dominant models of influence and intertextuality, which understand textual agency as residing either in the individual author or decentered in an abstract textuality. My case studies demonstrate how referentiality between texts becomes an alternative site of belonging and sociality—in contrast to the rejected nation as a home—thus privileging a collective definition of intertextuality. And third, my readings bring into relief modernism’s symptomatic appropriation of marginality, from the perspective of a literary tradition itself in the cultural periphery. By tracing the intersecting lines of marginality in minor European poets identifying with Jewishness, exile, and diaspora, my dissertation proposes a decentering of the terminology of minor and major, while calling for a distance from modernism’s problematic tendency to exploit racialized marginality as a trope.

The first chapter, “Exiles in the Borderland: Gunnar Ekelöf’s and Hagar Olsson’s KarelianPilgrimages” examines the intertextual model emerging in the pilgrimage narratives of the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. Conceived of as Södergran’s, and Finnish culture’s, mythical original home, the Karelian borderland is viewed by both writers as a utopian anti-nationalist site. In the chapter, I demonstrate how what I call “textual pilgrimage” to the site encapsulates for both authors a theory of reading by dramatizing a modernist mode of (inter)textual attention. As such, it makes two arguments, by facilitating an aesthetic and spiritual reorientation and at the same time—in a contradictory way—negotiating the production of national identities and literary canons. Furthermore, both Olsson and Ekelöf set forth a formal ideal of a cryptic text that requires exegesis, and advocate the notion of an interpreter’s special, even sacred, authority. Pilgrimage represents for both writers the fantasy of overcoming, through textual empathy, the fundamental outsiderness represented by the borderland, conceived by both authors as exile. The centrifugal journey turns out to have been homebound all along, as both writers ultimately thematize the failure of a return to a pre-modern unity that might be found elsewhere.

The second chapter “Moving Boundaries: The Jewish Cemetery in Prague in SwedishPoetry” picks up the trope of the cemetery that has been introduced in the previous chapter, continuing to build on the notion of (inter)textual empathy. The chapter traces the topos of the Jewish cemetery in Prague over the course of a hundred years of Swedish poetry, as it travels from Carl Snoilsky to Ernst Josephson, Oscar Levertin, Arvid Mörne, Sten Selander, and finally to Birgitta Trotzig and Tomas Tranströmer. Rooted in the Romantic cult of sensibility, the intertextually fabricated site brings to relief an implied intertextual theory which views poetry as a virtual space for compassionate encounters with otherness. The site, a simultaneous emblem of mobility and fixity, is appreciated for its ability not only to move across contexts but to move us. From the post-1850 influx of Ashkenazi migration from Russia and Poland to post-1968 antinationalism, the trope is allegorized and universalized along the way, constituting a proxy for discourses on race, nationality, and belonging in Sweden and Swedish-speaking Finland. By following the image through the decades, we find that the Jewish cemetery in Prague is evocative to these poets precisely as it articulates unreadability, illustrating how poetry thematizes its own shortcomings, while simultaneously exemplifying the racialized juxtaposition of homecoming and exile in the project of nation building.

The third chapter, entitled “Occult Communities: Selma Lagerlöf, Aino Kallas, and thePoetics of Self-Sacrifice,” focuses on the intertextual dialogue between Aino Kallas and Selma Lagerlöf. Both writers thematize the production of possibilities for gendered subjects through the figure of the wolf and a melodramatic destruction of the protagonist, proposing a feminist politics of surrender and unreadability, in response to the patriarchal control over women’s bodies. The chapter furthermore suggests that Kallas develops Lagerlöf’s idea of futurity into a view of intertextuality itself as a utopian space of community, where female agency and queer intimacy is fostered. Despite the bond, Kallas’ novella also seeks to correct Lagerlöf where she deems her solutions to fall short, by revising the fractured female subject and subscribing to political solutions that privilege the individual of the present over the community of the future.

The fourth and final chapter, “Negating Children: Anti-Tradition in the 1920s Finland-Swedish Literature,” puts three Finland-Swedish writers into conversation: the modernist poets Gunnar Björling and Edith Södergran as well as the “last” writer of the previous period, Runar Schildt. Against the broader horizon of modernist literature’s typical disavowal of belonging in tradition—its characteristic anti-traditional rhetorical arsenal—the chapter examines how in all their works, the tension between infertility and fertility (or child/lessness) becomes a vehicle for the negotiation of belonging, both in the literary tradition and in the nation. As the site of the reproduction of the nation, the figure of the child encompasses anxieties regarding literature’s usefulness to the state, coming to function as a disruptive operator in the discourses of all writers. Yet, while all three share the gesture of rejecting tradition and futurity, thus calling into question the notion of modernist break, we also witness a characteristically modernist mode of intertextuality emerging in the works of Södergran and Björling, one that envisions a production of possibilities through elective kinships, in contrast to Schildt’s aesthetic pessimism. For the two modernists, the proliferation and queering of potential family lines through imagery of boundless fertility as well as a playful identification with the position of a rebelling child offers a complex model of identification and disidentification through intertextuality.

This dissertation proposes new readings of the Nynorsk poetry tradition and changing views of the relationship between nature, aesthetics, and language therein. Through the dual frameworks of ecocriticism and the study of global modernisms, I take Ivar Aasen, Olav Nygard, and Aslaug Vaa as examples of writers who are strongly associated with a particular rural region, yet also experienced increased mobility due to social changes brought about by modernization in Norway. I examine how these poets viewed their relationship to rural nature and cultural traditions and adapted them to create a new, vernacular literary tradition. Using ecocritical understandings of nature as the co-product of human and nonhuman processes, I argue that poets in the Nynorsk tradition often represent nature as an agent in the formation of culture, partly as an effort to argue for the cultural agency of rural people as well. This involves a situated, rather than detached, understanding of the environment. Moreover, using the concept of ecopoetics, I examine their understanding and use of language as something dynamic and not wholly subject to human control as a part of the Nynorsk tradition and aesthetic. This view of language facilitates an understanding of the poem and the lyric tradition as processual and creates a less individualistic understanding of the role of the poet. This dissertation thus contributes to ecopoetics by positing the efficacy of poetic practice, rather than representation, as a means of mobilizing poetry in the service of social or political ends. Likewise, it contributes to the globalization of both modernism and ecocriticism by interpreting the relationship between human and nonhuman nature in the Norwegian context as negotiated and positing that advocating for the co-agency of nature and rural people was a key part of the rural writer’s modern experience.

In chapter one, I interpret Ivar Aasen’s glossary of vernacular plant names, Norske Plantenavne (1860), as a text that draws attention to the situated knowledge that rural Norwegians had of their local environments. This represents an attempt to legitimize such knowledge; however, Aasen ultimately participates in the effacement of that same knowledge by attempting to reconcile it with Linnaean taxonomy. The collection and promotion of vernacular plant names in the Norwegian knowledge tradition, however, blurs the boundary between ethnobotany and the natural sciences and establishes a foundation for the idea of rural people as having a unique contribution to make to national identity.

In chapter two, I examine how the relationship between the concepts heim [home] and verd [world] in Aasen’s poetry collection, Symra, similarly negotiates between rural environments and the changes occurring within and beyond them. By reconsidering previous ways of categorizing these poems, I demonstrate how concerns regarding nature and culture intersect throughout Aasen’s work. In particular, I argue that the negotiated relationship to nature Aasen represents in the rural context is constructed in an effort to demonstrate what assets and tools rural people can utilize to negotiate their entrance into a wider world without losing a sense of orientation or community. Aasen thus represents ways in which rural people and nature are uniquely vulnerable in the process of modernization but also champions their unique capacity to weather difficulty.

In chapter three, I examine the work of a poet who did weather a number of difficulties that he faced as a person of rural origin compelled to mobilize in pursuit of economic and creative opportunities. I argue that Olav Nygard experienced modernity unevenly in that it provided him with access to education and the aspiration to be a poet but not with the economic stability to achieve his aspirations. In Nygard’s poetry, this informs his interest in both dynamic nature and language as unstable ground. Using the concepts of sensuous poesis from the field of ecopoetics and new materialist approaches to agency, I examine how Nygard not only represents but enacts new understandings of thought, memory, and the body as diffuse material processes not confined to the individual subject. However, rather than a source of distress, expanding the capacity of Nynorsk in order to express these novel understandings of nature and language provided Nygard with a source of optimism in the face of change.

In chapters four and five, I turn to the prose and poetry of Aslaug Vaa. Associated with the high mountain region of Telemark, Vaa developed a global consciousness during her studies in continental Europe and travels in West Africa. Thus, the creative capacity she believes Nynorsk to have is beneficial not only within the narrow confines of Norwegian culture and literature but is a potential model for how vernacular language and local cultural traditions might empower other communities marginalized by political and economic developments in modernity. In particular, I argue that Vaa represents women, rural Africans, and nature as silenced by instrumental rationality. However, through a notion of biosemiotics, or the ability of all living things to communicate in either unarticulated or articulated language, I contend that Vaa sees attention to the language of living things as a practice that can revitalize language and the mind and safeguard the creative capacity of the individual. Furthermore, I explain how Vaa enacts that attention in her poetry through poetic forms that emphasize poetry’s ritual function, thus engaging the reader in a practice of attending to aural and visual signals in nature.

This study examines selections from the work of three modernist writers who also supported Norwegian fascism and the Nazi occupation of Norway: Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize; Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994), Norway's major modernist poet; and Åsmund Sveen (1910-1963), a fascinating but forgotten expressionist figure. In literary studies, the connection between fascism and modernism is often associated with writers such as Ezra Pound or Filippo Marinetti. I look to a new national context and some less familiar figures to think through this international issue. Employing critical models from both literary and historical scholarship in modernist and fascist studies, I examine the unique and troubling intersection of aesthetics and politics presented by each figure.

After establishing a conceptual framework in the first chapter, "Unsettling Modernity," I devote a separate chapter to each author. Analyzing both literary publications and lesser-known documents, I describe how Hamsun's early modernist fiction carnivalizes literary realism and bourgeois liberalism; how Sveen's mystical and queer erotic vitalism overlapped with aspects of fascist discourse; and how Jacobsen imagined fascism as way to overcome modernity's culture of nihilism. In various ways, I argue, the intellectual orientation that motivates their turn to fascist utopianism also lies behind their modernist urge to create new anti-bourgeois and anti-realist forms of artistic expression.

Each case shows a transition from an aesthetic form of anti-rationalism or anti-nihilism to political form of renewal - a shift from a literary encounter with modernity's scene of chaos and reduction to an ideological fantasy of redemption via fascism. As we know, the sort of redemption that Hamsun, Sveen, and Jacobsen imagined to be embodied in European fascism turned out catastrophically - for their own postwar lives and compromised legacies, but more importantly for the millions of people they never knew who died in the Nazi genocide.

This dissertation analyzes FX’s television serial The Americans (2013-2018)—a late Cold War spy period drama—as a vehicle for exploring the contradictions of today’s mixed analog-digital culture. The serial appears to take a nostalgic approach to the analog past, especially in its attention to the painstaking work of espionage. I argue, however, that The Americans refigures the 1980s as a key moment of continuity between the analog and the digital. I contend that the show’s looming historical deadline is not only the end of the Cold War, but even more so the proliferation of digital networks. The topics I explore in detail in this dissertation—spy craft, networks, and marriage—are all lenses through which The Americans dramatizes the perceived increases in distance, scale, mediality, and anonymity that accompany the rise of digital technology. The show exhibits its own hybrid analog-digital craft by employing the tools of digital serial television to elicit fascination with hands-on analog spy craft, while also bringing actual analog artifacts and techniques into its production.

The Americans remains the primary case study throughout this dissertation, even as I interweave other televisual and cinematic examples, along with discourses from media theory and popular journalism. My methodology treats the single, sustained case study as emblematic of larger cultural and historical phenomena. I further investigate how The Americans intermingles the genres of spy thriller, domestic melodrama, and historical period drama in order to uncover allegorical echoes of the present in the fictionalized past. The long duration of the show’s serial storytelling brings The Americans’ ongoing engagement with a reimagined past into an ever-changing and unfolding present.

This dissertation reads melodrama as an important influence in Carl Th. Dreyer's work and oeuvre and shows that his work demonstrates melodrama's relevance to the tradition of Scandinavian art–house, modernist cinema. Dreyer's work has come to embody a stern and severe aesthetic seen largely as the epitome of artistic restraint rather than indicative of melodramatic expressivity. Dreyer began his career in cinema, however, at the Danish studio Nordisk Films Kompagni in the 1910s when the company became synonymous with early Danish film melodrama and other spectacular, mass–produced, popular fare. Scholars have subsequently labeled this decade “The Golden Age of Danish Melodrama.” Although the standard reception of Dreyer's work predicates his status as a masterful auteur director upon his decisive break with the company's production model, its themes, and popular–culture ambitions, this dissertation argues that asserting such a break occludes intriguing continuities in Dreyer's oeuvre.

The rich proliferation of melodrama scholarship in decades following Dreyer's death in 1968 has radically expanded what can be understood as “melodrama,” allowing important affective concerns in Dreyer's work to come to light. Melodrama scholarship allows us to characterize Dreyer's innovation of cinema not only on formal terms, but now also through his developing representations of human suffering, volition, interiority, and emotion. No longer exclusively a genre, style, or theatrical tradition, melodrama is now better understood as a powerful and adaptable mode that informs a variety of media, ranging from soap operas to novels by Henry James. The connotations of melodrama available to earlier scholarship and to Dreyer himself could not avoid its strongly pejorative sense; more recent work has made clear the pervasive presence of the mode as a productive category in both “high" and “low” forms of culture. Consequently, Dreyer's unique inflection of melodrama reflects his simultaneous relation of repulsion and of attraction to the mode, driven by his perceived need to distance himself from melodrama's low–art stigma. To negotiate this paradox Dreyer continually reimagines and pressures the mode while remaining sympathetic to its core interests: its depictions of suffering, its humanist faith in art's capacity to convey something about existence, and its existential desires to recuperate meaning in a world shaken by modernity's upheaval of traditional cosmologies. Neither fully modernist nor fully submissive to realism's illusions, melodrama provides a productive framework for understanding both the aesthetic ingenuity and more conservative elements of Dreyer's modernism.

The first chapters of this dissertation outline advances in melodrama scholarship relevant to the project and then trace the category of “melodrama” through the standard reception both of silent–era Danish film melodrama at Nordisk and in Dreyer reception more generally. The final chapters parse out Dreyer's innovation of melodrama in three of his major works, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Jeanne d'Arc, 1928), Vredens Dag (Day of Wrath, 1943), and Ordet (The Word, 1955) by comparing his “mature” films and by drawing upon key moments in the melodramatic scenarios he wrote at Nordisk. In Jeanne d'Arc Dreyer innovates corporeal spectacle, the ethical interaction and thrill of performance, and exploits the limits between “live theater” and film by conflating phenomenological and semiotic performing bodies. Day of Wrath extends and heightens melodramatic tensions surrounding domestic melodrama's conveyance of interiority through expressively charged bodily surfaces. Dreyer uses the body and psychological interiority of his protagonist, Anne (whose will and desire are stifled by relationships in the domestic sphere), to evoke a melodramatic worldview rife with epistemological uncertainty and ambiguous causality. In The Word, Dreyer juxtaposes elements of maternal melodrama with intense depictions of male suffering and tears to create art–house melodrama's version of a male–weepie. This film also bears traces of Dreyer's persistent interest in the materiality of the filmed body and in depicting gradations of consciousness, drawing on multiple precedents in early Danish film melodrama. In conclusion, Dreyer's oeuvre vitally broadens our understanding of the potentials of the melodramatic mode and the specific tradition of “Scandinavian art–house melodrama.”

This dissertation takes as its starting point my own fascination, as well as a broader cultural fascination, with what I call child-animal figurations. I use the phrase “child-animal figurations” to refer to the range of relationships and associations between children and animals that are as prevalent in art and literature as they are in everyday life. Though these figurations are often considered “natural,” this dissertation argues that child-animal figurations can be highly charged sites for testing the limits of development, subjectivity, power, and species. I make this argument through analysis of several examples of Scandinavian literature and a Finnish documentary film. Scandinavian literature and culture offer a rich context in which to test hypotheses about child-animal figurations, not least because children and “nature”—including animals—enjoy special statuses in the Nordic countries, both in the figural traditions and in contemporary social realities. Drawing on scholarship in children’s literature, childhood studies, animal studies, and queer studies, this dissertation suggests that Scandinavian child-animal figurations provide new and critical insight for how we interpret narratives, including the all-important narrative of how—or whether—to grow up.

The first chapter considers the critical relationship among childhood, animals, and citizenship in two canonical Scandinavian children’s texts. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notions of the “the child queered by innocence” and “sideways growth,” I argue the protagonists in these texts can be understood as queer child figures whose non-normative development, facilitated by the animal, presents a surprising deviation from the nation-building agendas otherwise laid out in the texts. The second chapter examines autobiographical works about childhood by three twentieth-century Norwegian authors, whose texts suggest that animals are not only good to think with but to remember with as well. I argue that the autobiographical child can be understood not only as a figure of the author’s interior or of her past, but also as a version of “sideways growth” (Stockton) in the form of a text. The third and final chapter engages with examples that test the limits of species and subjectivity, including Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, which I read through a posthumanist lens (against the grain of the humanism that dominates Jansson scholarship), and the documentary film Hobbyhorse Revolution, in which I read the Finnish girl on her hobbyhorse as a cyborg in the sense put forth by Donna Haraway. In concluding the dissertation, I argue that the common notion of the “competent child” does not go far enough in explaining what makes the Nordic child a fascinating figure, and I propose the figure of the Nordic queer child as a necessary complement to the “competent” or “autonomous” child.

Recent scholars tend to describe cross-dressing as inherently transgressive. Cross-dressing, they explain, shows us that there is no natural link between physical sex and social roles. It shows us that we cannot trust our own vision, or even, as Marjorie Garber argues, the very notion of categories. Furthermore, scholars argue that early-twentieth-century Americans viewed female masculinity as unattractive and pathological, associated with shrewish suffragettes and sexual inverts. It may seem strange then, that the emerging American moving picture industry produced over three hundred films featuring cross-dressed women during the silent era. More than seventy percent of these films were released between 1908 and 1919, American cinema's "transitional era," when moving picture makers struggled to "uplift" their products in order to win over middle-class audiences and avoid censorship. These films and their complex cultural functions are largely missing from existing film historical accounts of this period. In this dissertation, I demonstrate that the circulation of an interpretive strategy that would read cross-dressing or "mannishness" as a sign of sexual inversion was much more limited than scholars have acknowledged. In fact, cross-dressed women helped moving pictures secure greater respectability by evoking a range of established, socially privileged representational traditions, thereby expanding the medium's appeal to broad audiences.

Over the course of the transitional era, moving pictures developed strategies to make performers' gender more consistently legible, adapting techniques from police detection, protean artists, sister acts, and newspaper photographs of men discovered to be female-bodied. At the same time, filmmakers cast women and girls in boy roles such as Oliver Twist in order to align the medium with genteel Anglo-American children's theater and Victorian sentimentalism. Cross-dressed women in frontier films, in contrast, provided an opportunity to see a capable, usually white, female body interacting with--and triumphing over--varied American natural landscapes. Their presence also helped as defuse the homoeroticism between men cultivated in sex-imbalanced frontier spaces. The "innocent" readings of cross-dressed women were so prominent during the transitional era that critics received even a seemingly obvious depiction of sexual inversion like A FLORIDA ENCHANTMENT (Vitagraph, August 1914) as wholesome, respectable comedy. Only in the 1920s and early 1930s did American moving pictures begin to connect cross-dressing and lesbianism, a shift that disrupted the practice's relationship to respectability.