AbstractsOther

The avoidance of procreation is a recurrent theme in John Dos Passos’s novels, playing an especially significant role in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and The Big Money (1936). However, few scholars publishing on gender in relation to Dos Passos have addressed the theme of procreation, or more precisely, his denial of procreation from his female characters. To fill this hiatus in the scholarship on Dos Passos, this thesis will address and explore several aspects of procreation as a theme in Manhattan Transfer and The Big Money, placing these novels in the wider social-historical context of contemporary debates about birth control and abortion, and especially the literary-historical context of modernism in general and Dos Passos’s work in particular.