1 ‘Pioneers, Labourers, Villagers, and Aesthetes: Migration and the Image of the City in American Fiction, 1880s- 1930s.’ Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles February 2015 Abstract The literary depiction of cities in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literature has often been carried out by protagonists with a migrant or immigrant status. The concept of the literary metropolis has in many cases been elaborated from the vantage point of a migrant gaze. In the turn-of- the-twentieth-century US, the link between urban development and migration was chiefly determined by the European and Asian immigration that contributed to the growth of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Yet in the present argument, the familiar figure of the foreign-born urban immigrant, however central, constitutes only one instance of a more general pattern. An analysis of urban migration must also consider cognate figures such as internal migrants—protagonists moving from small towns to the metropolis—and artistic exiles for whom a deterritorialised relation to urban space serves as guarantee of existential autonomy. The present paper tests this premise in a corpus stretching from the 1880s—the earliest decades of the American fiction of the metropolitan experience—to the 1930s, when the naturalist immigrant novel became a prominent feature of US literature. These works construct a perception of urban space that plays off against one another mutually non-exclusive subject positions linked to specific chronotopes: the urban pioneer, the urban villager, and the flâneur aesthete. In so doing, this study makes it possible to bring forth continuities in the American literary representation of urban space cutting across supposedly distinct literary periods (realism, naturalism, modernism). 1. Urban Chronotopes and the Migratory Gaze Cities in turn-of-the-twentieth-century US fiction are seldom surveyed from the perspective of spatially anchored protagonists: the American urban world is in most cases the object of a migratory gaze. Such wandering observers are a recurrent feature of the city in any literary tradition. As a