A Proposal to Study on the Businessman in American Novels at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This paper aims at evoking interest in business novels among literary scholars. American industrialization which began in the early nineteenth century gave rise to big business and American businessman in the United States. Even with the much increased influence and visibility of American businessman in American society, he was not prominent in fiction until William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1884) after which the businessman figure became more visible in American fictions. However, literary scholars paid little attention to the businessman figure, and it was economists and economic historians that took interest in it. Though there were some variations, their main focus was mainly on whether novelists had positive or negative perspective on businessman. The research framework of dichatomy led scholars to view characters in fictions as one dimensional being: bad person or good person. In addition, the researchers neither had proper defintion of “businessman,” nor effective mothodology that would enable them to analyze businessman figure properly. This paper suggests—though not perfect in any sense—a useful definition of the term “businessman” and theories from Organizational Behavior, a branch of Management, particularly motivation theories and leadership theories.