American Regionalism Literature
American Regionalism Literature refers to a literary movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that focused on depicting the unique characteristics and culture of specific regions in the United States. Writers such as Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett captured the dialects, customs, and landscapes of their respective regions, often critiquing the impact of industrialization and modernization on rural life.
3 Key excerpts on "American Regionalism Literature"
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...Here’s a simple definition: You are controlled by your environment. There is no hope for you. Dreams come and dreams go. You are controlled by your gender, race, socioeconomic standing, and ethnicity. There is a glass ceiling and you will hit it every time you venture beyond your status. Depressing, huh? Yes, it is. There is more to the literary movement than that, of course. Naturalism was greatly influenced by the work of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Karl Marx, and Emile Zola, and other naturalists who posited that humans are not that different from animals in that they merely respond to natural and environmental forces without fully understanding the forces or their reactions to them. What is also important about naturalist fiction is that the author and the narrator are amoral in their depictions of the characters and the plot: they do not judge or editorialize; they merely observe. Regionalism The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw an increase in authors and works published outside of New England. It’s not an understatement to assert that Boston was the cultural and intellectual center of America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, westward expansion, the Civil War, the railroad, and a growing Union gave space for literature to be produced in the Middle West, the West, and the South. “Regionalism” is a literary term that refers to a work that connects itself to a particular geography: its history, culture, ways of speech, leisure activities, occupations, folklore, food, clothing, and so on. In fact, the setting of the story takes on the role of another character; the plot cannot take place just anywhere without suffering greatly. In this section, we will pay attention to regionalists such as Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, and Jack London. THE MAJOR WRITERS Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835–1910) Twain is still one of the most recognizable names in American literature...
eBook - ePubAmerican Cultural Studies
An Introduction to American Culture
- Neil Campbell, Alasdair Kean(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This is a reminder that we need to take care when we examine the way in which the supposed identity of a place interacts with its history. Generalisations about the character of the South or West may depend upon assumptions about their ‘past’, which themselves contain untested judgements. This section argues, therefore, for a form of Critical Regionalism, a term evolved from the architectural work of Lefaivre and Tzonis and Kenneth Frampton, suggesting a sense of regionalism ‘infused with … relativity’, critical of both imposed universalism and naïve localism, and in a ‘constant process of negotiation between local and global’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2003: 34). The recognition of alternative stories in the form of regional variety and difference asserts diversity and plural ism against any totalising impulse, showing an aware ness of com plex issues of race, gender and ethnicity, baulking against assumptions of some common identity, and preferring instead the assertion of difference. In this spirit, we would concur with Stephanie Foote’s comment: The local knowledges that regionalism first helped publicize fracture any monolithic narrative of American literature and … identity. Because it held open the meaning of America and Americanness, regional writing helped to create a way to understand and value social differences, and helped to establish a way of imagining communities that interrupted even as they sustained a national culture. (Crow 2003: 40) Rooted in the actual varied landscapes of America, regionalism exists as a series of critical dialogues with the centre’s official histories and definitions and with the world beyond, while still celebrating local multiplicity and national diversity...
eBook - ePub- Richard Gray(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Chapter 3 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future The Development of American Literature 1865–1900 Rebuilding a Nation The Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history, with over 360,000 Union soldiers and 260,000 Confederates lost on the battlefield or in military hospitals. Within a few decades after the war, however, the United States was assuming a new prosperity and developing into an industrial giant, with over half the population in the Eastern states living in towns and cities and an industrial investment of over four billion dollars. An emergent ideology of success celebrated the growth of American power and wealth. And the spread of education and literacy, the technology of mass production, the access to market opened up by the railways all meant that something like a uniform print culture was possible for the entire nation, and that specialist audiences could also be catered to or even created. There was, in short, uniformity but also diversity. The Development of Literary Regionalisms From Adam to Outsider Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), called this period “the Gilded Age.” “My books are simply autobiographies,” Twain insisted once. True of every American writer, perhaps, the remark seems especially true of him. He relied, frequently and frankly, on personal experience: in accounts of his travels, for instance, like The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and A Tramp Abroad (1880). Even those books of his that were the results of strenuous imaginative effort can be read as attempts to resolve his inner divisions, and create some sense of continuity between his present and his past, his critical investment in common sense, pragmatism, and progress and his emotional involvement in his childhood and the childhood of his region and nation. The inner divisions and discontinuity were, in fact, inseparable...
