SOURCE: “Fiction and the Science of Society,” in The Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott, Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 189-215.

In the following essay, Mizruchi examines the emergence of the science of sociology in the nineteenth century and discusses the ways in which the concerns of this new science corresponded to the concerns of contemporary novelists.

In The Incorporation of America (1982), Alan Trachtenberg describes the significance of the White City as symbol, its ability to transform the diverse and conflicted America of 1893 into an image of national unity. White City was a study in managed pluralism: organized into twenty departments and two hundred twenty-five divisions, contained within one overarching “symmetrical order … each building and each vista serving as an image of the whole.” The choice of White City as the main design for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was suggestive at the most...