American literary regionalism

Last updated

American literary regionalism, often used interchangeably with the term "local color", is a style or genre of writing in the United States that gained popularity in the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century. In this style of writing, which includes both poetry and prose, the setting is particularly important and writers often emphasize specific features, such as dialect, customs, history and landscape, of a particular region, often one that is "rural and/or provincial". [1] Regionalism is influenced by both 19th-century realism and Romanticism, adhering to a fidelity of description in the narrative but also infusing the tale with exotic or unfamiliar customs, objects, and people.

Contents

Literary critics argue that nineteenth-century literary regionalism helped preserve American regional identities while also contributing to domestic reunification efforts after the Civil War. [2] Richard Brodhead argues in Cultures of Letters, "Regionalism's representation of vernacular cultures as enclaves of tradition insulated from larger cultural contact is palpably a fiction ... its public function was not just to mourn lost cultures but to purvey a certain story of contemporary cultures and of the relations among them" (121). [3]

Amy Kaplan, in contrast, debates race relations, empire, and literary regionalism in the nineteenth century, noting that "regions painted with 'local color' are traversed by the forgotten history of racial conflict with prior regional inhabitants, and are ultimately produced and engulfed by the centralized capitalist economy that generates the desire for retreat" (256). Critic Eric Sundquist ultimately suggests the social inequity inherent in the aesthetic distinction between realist and regionalist authors, noting: "Economic or political power can itself be seen to be definitive of a realist aesthetic, in that those in power (say, white urban males) have been more often judged 'realists,' while those removed from the seats of power (say, Midwesterners, blacks, immigrants, or women) have been categorized as regionalists" (503). [4]

Characteristics

Any literary movement will have its diversity, but there are certain shared characteristics that help to define a literary movement. In the case of regionalism, these characteristics include the following: [5]

Regional writers

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Norris</span> American journalist and novelist (1870-1902)

Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr. was an American journalist and novelist during the Progressive Era, whose fiction was predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901) and The Pit (1903).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese literature</span> Literature of Japan

Japanese literature throughout most of its history has been influenced by cultural contact with neighboring Asian literatures, most notably China and its literature. Early texts were often written in pure Classical Chinese or lit.'Chinese writing', a Chinese-Japanese creole language. Indian literature also had an influence through the spread of Buddhism in Japan.

Naturalism is a literary movement beginning in the late nineteenth century, similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. Literary naturalism emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality. Naturalism includes detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, which is defined as the opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined, by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life. The novel would be an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the forces, or scientific laws, that influenced behavior, and these included emotion, heredity, and environment. The movement largely traces to the theories of French author Émile Zola.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Harding Davis</span> American author and journalist

Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis was an American author and journalist. She was a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the short story "Life in the Iron-Mills," published in the April 1861 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for African Americans, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern United States literature</span> American literature about the Southern United States; literature by writers from that region

Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".

Literature of the 19th century refers to world literature produced during the 19th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) 1799 to 1900. Many of the developments in literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts and other aspects of 19th-century culture.

Romantic realism is art that combines elements of both romanticism and realism. The terms "romanticism" and "realism" have been used in varied ways, and are sometimes seen as opposed to one another.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Pafford Miller</span> American writer

Caroline Pafford Miller was an American novelist. She gathered the folktales, stories, and archaic dialects of the rural communities she visited in her home state of Georgia in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and wove them into her first novel, Lamb in His Bosom, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1934, and the French literary award, the Prix Femina Americain in 1935. Her success as the first Georgian winner of the fiction prize inspired Macmillan Publishers to seek out more southern writers, resulting in the discovery of Margaret Mitchell, whose first novel, Gone with the Wind, also won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Miller's story about the struggles of nineteenth-century south Georgia pioneers found a new readership in 1993 when Lamb in His Bosom was reprinted, one year after her death. In 2007, Miller was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of the Americas. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is often associated solely with this style, with the 20th century literary movement known as Latin American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel García Márquez. Latin American literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries.

McOndo is a Latin American literary movement that breaks with the magical realism mode of narration, and counters it with languages borrowed from mass media. The literature of McOndo presents urban Latin American life, in opposition to the fictional rural town of Macondo.

Judith Fetterley is a literary scholar known for her work in feminism and women's studies. She was influential in leading a reappraisal of women's literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the contributions of women writing about women's experience, including their perspectives on men in the world.

Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal) and Russian literature. Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict every day and banal activities and experiences.

The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Jane Holmes</span> American novelist

Mary Jane Holmes was an American author who published 39 novels, as well as short stories. Her first novel sold 250,000 copies; and she had total sales of 2 million books in her lifetime, second only to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her books included: "Tempest and Sunshine" (1854), "English Orphans" (1855), "Homestead on the Hillside" (1855), "Lena Rivers" (1856), "Meadow Brook" (1857), "Dora Deane" (1858), "Cousin Maude" (1860), "Marian Gray" 186^, "Hugh Worthington" (1864), "Cameron Vide" (1867). "Rose Mather" (1868), "Ethelyn’s Mistake" (1869), "Edna Browning" (1872), "Mildred" (1877), "Forest House" (1879), "Daisy Thornton," "Queenie Hetherton" (1883), "Christmas Stories" (1884), "Bessie's Fortune" (1885). "Gretchen" (1887), "Marguerite" (1891).

David Der-wei Wang is a literary historian, critic, and the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. He has written extensively on post-late Qing Chinese fiction, comparative literary theory, colonial and modern Taiwanese literature, diasporic literature, Chinese Malay literature, Sinophone literature, and Chinese intellectuals and artists in the 20th century. His notions such as "repressed modernities", "post-loyalism", and "modern lyrical tradition" are instrumental and widely discussed in the field of Chinese literary studies.

George B. Hutchinson is a noted American scholar, Professor of Literatures in English and Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture at Cornell University, where he is also Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. He is well known for his transformative work on 19th- and 20th-century American and African American literature and culture, focusing especially on the racial mores, materialistic addictions, and ecological errors of the United States. A recipient of both the NEH and Guggenheim Fellowships, he is the author of several foundational books.

A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.

The literature of Georgia, United States, includes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Representative writers include Erskine Caldwell, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor, Charles Henry Smith, and Alice Walker.

The literature of Louisiana, United States, includes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Representative authors include Kate Chopin, Alcée Fortier, Ernest Gaines, Walker Percy, Anne Rice and John Kennedy Toole.

The literature of South Carolina, United States, includes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Representative authors include Dorothy Allison, Daniel Payne and William Gilmore Simms.

References

  1. J.A Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p.560.
  2. "The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture — Amy Kaplan | Harvard University Press". www.hup.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2017-04-18.
  3. Cultures of Letters.
  4. Elliott, Emory (1991). The Columbia History of the American Novel . Columbia University Press. ISBN   9780231073608. Columbia Literary History of the novel.
  5. "Regionalism and Local Color Fiction". public.wsu.edu. Retrieved 2023-08-19.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Campbell, Donna M. (2017-10-10). "Regionalism and Local Color Fiction, 1865-1895". Dept. of English, Washington State University. Retrieved 2021-01-19.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Blight, David W. (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England. p. 444n21. ISBN   0-674-00819-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. Watts, Edward; Carlson, David J. (2012). "Introduction". In Watts, Edward; Carlson, David J. (eds.). John Neal and Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press. p. xxi. ISBN   978-1-61148-420-5.

Bibliography