This fascinating account of the regional travel accident motif within American local color literature offers a reassessment of the cultural work done by authors writing during the Gilded Age. Stephanie C. Palmer shows how events like broken carriage wheels and missed trains were used by local color authors to bring together bourgeois and lower-class characters, thus giving readers the opportunity to see modernity coming into contact with both rural and urban life.
Using the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others, Palmer traces the use of the regional travel accident motif and how local color writers employed it to give critiques on class, society, and modern life. Exploring the themes of regional identity, modernity, and interpersonal relationships, Together by Accident offers an intriguing evaluation of the innovations and inconveniences associated with life during the industrializing Gilded Age in America.

eBook - PDF
Together by Accident
American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class
- 234 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 01. Can the Genteel Writer Write the Local Novel?: Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, and Rose Terry Cooke
- Chapter 02. Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside: Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett
- Chapter 03. Travel Delays and Provincial Ambition: Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter
- Chapter 04. Realist Magic in the Country and the City: William Dean Howells
- Chapter 05. Angry Reform from Elsewhere in New England: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
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Yes, you can access Together by Accident by Stephanie C. Palmer in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American History. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.