Local Color Novel

11 Key excerpts on "Local Color Novel"

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  Setting in the American Short Story of Local Color, 1865–1900

  • Robert D. Rhode(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  It is realism run mad The realist of this year of grace has fallen into the same delusion as the stage-managers, that elaborate and historically accurate setting is essen-tial. But if the characterization be vital and the tale compelling in interest, the rest is leather and prunella .... Learn to distinguish between the essence and the accidents. 19 More recent literary historians, though fully aware of the wide range of implications the term local color has acquired, have begun to see some new positive significance in the American local color stories. Alexander Cowie, though well aware of the short-comings of the local color writers, notes a seriousness, an in-tegrity, and a finely poetic quality in their descriptions, in addition to their honestly derived and authentic characters. 20 Richard M. Weaver credits the movement with the real begin-ning of aesthetic sensibility in America. 2 1 As would be expected, most definitions of local color, like that of the New English Dictionary, fall safely between those of Allen and Garland. But all assume a literary objective which aims primarily at the interpretation of the American scene or landscape rather than at the revelation of universal truth or general laws of human nature. In philosophical terms, the literature of local color is one of Aristotelian particulars rather than Platonic forms. As used in this book, then, local color will connote in itself neither approbation nor disapprobation; it will refer to those details in a narrative setting which particularize it in time and place. T o the extent that the elements of fiction are mutually inclusive, local color has to do with character and plot, but its chief business is with setting, in relation to which it stands either as an auxiliary or 19 Worship of Local Color, The Nation, LXXXIV, 75 (January 24, 1907). 20 Rise of the American Novel (New York, 1948), 536-37. 21 Op. cit., 305.

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  The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South

  • Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, Monica Carol Miller, Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette, Monica Carol Miller(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Local color can be defined by its interest in, and perhaps exaggeration of, the unique qualities of local (generally rural) communities: the distinctive speech and dialect, the unusual customs, the characteristic communal rituals and beliefs. While this literature was not restricted to the southern states (think of Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Hamlin Garland), it found its most consistent home in the distinctive cultures that existed in out-​of-​the-​way southern locales. At the time of the rise of local color, the nation was experiencing a host of alienating and life-​changing realities: a rise in immigration, a post-​Civil War crisis of national unity, a rapid growth of national travel and communication, and the urbanization of formerly agrarian communities. Perhaps the single biggest contributor to the rise of local color literature, however, was the growing popularity of national periodicals, such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s and the Century. These periodicals invested vast resources and space to writing about the U.S. South, as well as other national regions and international spaces. Especially popular were travelogs that recorded a person’s observations as they traveled the nation. Not surprisingly, the southern states were heavily represented in these travelogues, which would often run for multiple issues, as the reader followed the author from location to location. Edward King’s “The Great South” appeared in 12 issues of Scribner’s Monthly in 1873–​1874 and Jonathan Baxter Harrison’s “Studies in the South” appeared serially in the Atlantic Monthly in 1882–​1883. Both of these enormous and enormously expensive projects sought to give readers a glimpse of the postbellum South, especially its out-​of-​the-​way places and its “exotic” citizens. Readers enthusiastically awaited these monthly reports, eager to learn about the parts of the country that fit less obviously and cleanly into the newly restitched national fabric

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  Locating Nordic Noir

  From Beck to The Bridge

  • Kim Toft Hansen, Anne Marit Waade(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The notion of local colour in this context was defined as picturesque details that reproduced a distinctive and lively image of a country, region or bygone era, as well as ‘the repre- sentation in vivid detail of the characteristic features of a particular period or country (e.g. manners, dress, scenery, etc.) in order to produce an impression of actuality’ (Kapor 2008a, 41). Secondly, a different under- standing of local colour in regard to Kapor’s genealogy (2008a) is found in the American local colour movement, a ‘group of regionalist prose writ- ers who emerged after the American Civil War and left a body of criti- cal reflections about their key notion and the poetics and movement in general’ (Kapor 2008a, 41). In this context, the actual place constituted 2 LOCAL COLOUR AND PLACES ON SCREEN 31 more than the raw material for artistic and literary work; it also formed part of a political agenda to preserve the record of ‘a changing or dying locale’ (Kapor 2008a, 41). Thirdly, local colour was a method to represent and reproduce the spirit of a particular place at a particular time. This is also what the term usually refers to today within the context of everyday conversations. Local colour is related to other terms such as nostalgia and narrative chrono- topes in literature and, in both cases, places themselves, the topoi, are significantly interesting in specific spatial relations to particular periods. Svetlana Boym (2001) reflects on how nostalgia includes a utopia, a future ideal place and condition, based on memories and recollections of the past, a recollection filled with particular emotions and pictorial expres- sions. Bakthin (1981) developed a narrative theory based on how every story and literary genre include certain time (chronos) and place (topos) constructions.

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  The Cambridge History of the English Novel

  • Robert L. Caserio, Clement Hawes(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, given the nature of novelistic discourse, and its ability to observe the minutiae of local conditions, there are reasons for thinking the opposite: that the novel is a preserve in which regional experience continues to be recorded. Keith Snell argues that the regional novel in Britain and Ireland – and especially England – has been on the increase since the 1980s. His definition identifies “fiction that is set in a recognizable region, and which describes features distinguishing the life, social relations, customs, dialect, or other aspects of the culture of that area and its people.” Snell sensibly includes in his definition 709 “fiction with a strong sense of local geography, topography or landscape.” In the spirit of Hardy’s “novels of character and environment,” regional fiction can show “the effects of a particular environment upon the people living in it,” even though, notwithstanding its use of detail in its sociological depictions, regional fiction also is expected to use “a particular place or regional culture . . . to illustrate an aspect of life in general.” 1 Snell does not exclude urban fiction from his purview; but he means a kind of urban fiction that treats convincingly an identifiable community with a strong sense of determining local factors. This interaction or tension between the rural and the urban raises larger historical and political questions whereby the treatment of the local is overshadowed by national issues. It is true that novelists of life in the English provinces have been centrally concerned with the nature of social change, and with how social change affects individual lives and communities; and it is quite possible for such writing to have a regional dimension if specific aspects of local experience are held in tension with the broader (national or international) dynamic of social change.

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  Soft Canons

  American Women Writers

  • Karen L. Kilcup(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  Many critics believe that local color and regionalism, particularly in the South, tended to provide rhetorical models with which to subli-mate regional frustration by projecting falsified memories of the past as well as romanticized illusions of the present. Some recent critics, however, have highlighted the importance of economic and political pressure on local color writing. According to Barbara C. Ewell, the literature of local color and regionalism in the South contributed to disguising the truths about Southern life at the end of the century because “the post-war prosperity of the United States, largely identified with the industrialized Northeast, de-pended on re-establishing the semi-colonial status of the South, an arrangement that was effectively accomplished after the Civil War.” But more important, “local color served to name and con-tain as ‘regional’ many of the disturbing differences that remained unsolved by the Civil War and its aftermath.” 5 This capacity to control and mask the unsolved problems of the times made the genre immensely popular in its initial phase but destroyed it in 142 : genre matters the long run. Other recent critics who trace the origins and de-velopment of American regionalism attribute its failure to ac-count for the true complexities of regional difference to the limi-tations of the poetics of realism: “Regionalism flourished under the poetics of realism . . . . the romantic yearning for cultural ho-mogeneity is merely replaced by a realist desire to frame regions in a homogeneous, one-world ontology.” 6 Nevertheless, some scholars have recognized local color and regionalism as often innovative and capable of incorporating im-portant political and ideological dimensions, and they have seen the need to take into account the considerable differences among regional writers.

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  The Mediating Nation

  Late American Realism, Globalization, and the Progressive State

  • Nathaniel Cadle(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Richard Brodhead has argued that local color’s “heavily conventionalized formulas” served as an enabling constraint, which worked to give first-time writers, including women, African Americans, and working-class people, “literary access in America.” 11 If these aspiring writers agreed to fulfill the stylistic and generic expectations of local color, then their work was more likely to appear in the national magazines of the day, thereby giving them relatively easy access to the publishing industry. As Amy Kaplan has pointed out, however, “this profusion of literature known as regionalism or local color [also] contributed to the process of centralization or nationalization” by reassuring readers that underlying similarities bound the nation’s various regions together into a single unit. 12 Thus the paradoxes of local color operated simultaneously at the level of individual texts, which used established conventions to represent regional or ethnic differences, and at the level of the U.S. publishing industry, which used these texts to produce a more homogenous mass culture. On one hand, this chapter extends to a global level the logic of incorporation that Brodhead and Kaplan have ascribed to local color. Howells’s later fiction, including A Hazard of New Fortunes, enacts a shift toward engaging—and sometimes attempting to resolve the problems of—such global processes as immigration and the circulation of radical art and politics, which were altering the social fabric of the United States. Likewise, his later criticism, including Criticism and Fiction, implicitly casts Howells himself not only as an arbiter of American literary taste, but as a gatekeeper of world literature. Howells’s assumption that the techniques of local color that American authors practiced could be adopted by writers in other countries as a means of accessing the American and, by extension, the world market is entirely consistent with the picture of the U.S. literary industry that Brodhead paints

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  Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920)

  • Carl Van Doren(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  The eager popular demand for these brevities does not entirely account for the failure of the type to go beyond its first experimental stage. The defects of local color inhere in the constitution of the cult itself, which, as its name suggests, thought first of color and then of form, first of the piquant surfaces and then—if at all—of the stubborn deeps of human life. In a sense, the local colorists were all pioneers: they explored the older communities as solicitously as they did the new, but they most of them came earliest in some field or other and found—or thought—it necessary to clear the top of the soil before they sank shaft or spade into it. Moreover, they accepted almost without challenge the current inhibitions of gentility, reticence, cheerfulness. They confined themselves to the emotions and the ideas and the language, for the most part, of the respectable; they disregarded the stormier or stealthier behavior of mankind or veiled it with discreet periphrasis; they sweetened their narratives wherever possible with a brimming optimism nicely tinctured with amiable sentiments. Poetic justice prospered and happy endings were orthodox. To a remarkable extent the local colorists passed by the immediate problems of Americans—social, theological, political, economic; nor did they frequently rise above the local to the universal. They were, in short, ordinarily provincial, without, however, the rude durability or the homely truthfulness of provincialism at its best.

  To reflect upon the achievements of this dwindling cult is to discover that it invented few memorable plots, devised almost no new styles, created little that was genuinely original in its modes of truth or beauty, and even added but the scantiest handful of characters to the great gallery of the imagination. What local color did was to fit obliging fiction to resisting fact in so many native regions that the entire country came in some degree to see itself through literary eyes and therefore in some degree to feel civilized by the sight. This is, indeed, one of the important processes of civilization. But in this case it was limited in its influence by the habits of vision which the local colorists had. They scrutinized their world at the instigation of benevolence rather than at that of intelligence; they felt it with friendship rather than with passion. And because of their limitations of intelligence and passion they fell naturally into routine ways and both saw and represented in accordance with this or that prevailing formula. Herein they were powerfully confirmed by the pressure of editors and a public who wanted each writer to continue in the channel of his happiest success and not to disappoint them by new departures. Not only did this result in confining individuals to a single channel each but it resulted in the convergence of all of them into a few broad and shallow streams.

  An excellent example may be found in the flourishing cycle of stories which, while Bret Harte was celebrating California, grew up about the life of Southern plantations before the war. The mood of most of these was of course elegiac and the motive was to show how much splendor had perished in the downfall of the old régime. Over and over they repeated the same themes: how an irascible planter refuses to allow his daughter to marry the youth of her choice and how true love finds a way; how a beguiling Southern maiden has to choose between lovers and gives her hand and heart to him who is stoutest in his adherence to the Confederacy; how, now and then, love crosses the lines and a Confederate girl magnanimously, though only after a desperate struggle with herself, marries a Union officer who has saved the old plantation from a marauding band of Union soldiers; how a pair of ancient slaves cling to their duty during the appalling years and will not presume upon their freedom even when it comes; how the gentry, though menaced by a riffraff of poor whites, nevertheless hold their heads high and shine brightly through the gloom; how some former planter and everlasting colonel declines to be reconstructed by events and passes the remainder of his years as a courageous, bibulous, orgulous simulacrum of his once thriving self. Mr. Page's In Ole Virginia and F. Hopkinson Smith's Colonel Carter of Cartersville

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  Pennsylvania German Literature

  Changing Trends from 1683 to 1942

  • Earl F. Robacker(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  Chapter VI THE LOCAL COLOR PERIOD: 1902 TO 1928 HE EARLIEST YEARS of the twentieth century saw the be-ginning of a whole new phase of Pennsylvania German existence: their exploitation in literature by a handful of writers who found in them a source of interest, curiosity, or amusement which could be turned to profitable account. Even though the English-speaking element of the state had always found the Dutch a remote and peculiar race, they could not begin to disseminate the propaganda that the fiction writers spread broadcast with such thoroughness. Story writ-ing, said Anthony Wanchope, is an attempt to preserve the life of a certain time and locality with all the concomitants of local coloring. The personal experience of the writer becomes thus all important as it should. He can testify only of what he knows. 1 But the belated school of local color writers, who in an earlier day had discovered New England, the South, the mid-West, and California, departed in varying de-grees from Wanchope's dictum, and sometimes wrote of what they did not know. We cannot forget that all the opprobrium and misrepre-sentation that has been cast upon the Germans of Pennsylvania has long been borne without a protest, said Diffenderfer in 1899, and proceeded to lay the burden of responsibility at the doors of New England, reminding the defamers that Pennsyl-vania had, among other things, abolished slavery before the sensitive soul of New England even took thought of the sub-ject, while it was still selling Indians and Quakers into West Indian slavery. 2 The masses, however, were not so articu-late, but in the face of the accumulating lore of the short story magazines and the repetitious novels maintained their tradi-tional reticence. The writers themselves are not to be thought of as neces-sarily malicious; rather, the curious body of half-information 1 North American Review, CLVIII (May 1894), 640. - Frank R. Diffenderfer, The German Immigration into America, P.G.S.

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  A Companion to the Victorian Novel

  • Patrick Brantlinger, William Thesing, Patrick Brantlinger, William Thesing(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In some cases a series of novels by a particular author covers a broadly regional ter-ritory, typically a county (Trollope’s Barsetshire; George Eliot’s Loamshire) or a former kingdom absorbed into the modern state (the Scotland of Walter Scott’s Tales of My Landlord ; Hardy’s Wessex). But individual works tend to focus on a smaller space, typically a parish or county town and its outlying countryside, in which the inhabit-ants are known to one another: Trollope’s Barchester or Framley, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Margaret Oliphant’s Carlingford, Hardy’s Casterbridge. While most criti-cal definitions emphasize a rural setting, a recent study argues that regionalism also encompasses urban and even metropolitan locations (see Snell 1998), and Raymond Williams’s insistence on the dialectical historical relation between country and city should always be kept in mind. Nor can the regional simply be mapped on to the category of the “peripheral,” in the terms of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system topology (Wallerstein 1974), since a number of novelists regionalize London itself, the imperial core, in a variety of ways. (Dickens is the outstanding example.) Some kind of rural setting is, however, the norm, and I shall focus my discussion on it, although I shall also look at urban regional fiction, in the industrial or condition of England novel, since it crucially affects other developments. Most commentators recognize a distinction between the categories of “regional” and “provincial” in nineteenth-century fiction (for an extended discussion, see Gilmour 1989; see also Keith 1988). The distinction is valid for heuristic purposes, although the relation between the categories is more variable, because historically pro-duced, than the commentary tends to allow. Regional fiction specifies its setting by invoking a combination of geographical, natural-historical, antiquarian, ethnographic, and/or sociological features that differentiate it from any other region .

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  A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America

  • Charles L. Crow(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Lohmann, vol. VI. Boston: Twayne. Howells, William Dean (1993). Selected Literary Criticism , vol. I. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-sity Press. James, W. P. (1897). “On the Theory and Prac-tice of Local Color.” Living Age 213 (June 12), 743–8. Jones, Gavin Roger (1999). Strange Talk: The Pol-itics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America . Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, Amy (1991). “Nation, Region, and Empire.” In Emory Elliott (ed.), The Columbia History of the American Novel , 240–66. New York: Columbia University Press. Kirkland, Caroline M. (1990). A New Home – Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life , ed. Sandra A. Zagarell. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. (First publ. 1839.) Kolodny, Annette (1984). The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lang, Andrew (1887). “Realism and Romance.” Littell’s Living Age 5th ser., vol. 60 (Dec. 10), 618–24. Lathrop, George Parsons (1886). “The Literary Movement in New York.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 73 (Nov.), 831–3. Lowell, James Russell (1867a). The Biglow Papers, Second Series , 1st edn. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. Lowell, James Russell (1867b). “A Fable for Critics.” In Edmund Wilson (ed.), The Shock of Recognition , 21–78. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1955. (First publ. 1848.) Mencken, H. L. (1919). “The Dean.” Prejudices, First Series . New York: Knopf. 52–8. Mencken, H. L. (1955). “Want Ad.” In Edmund Wilson (ed.), The Shock of Recognition , 1238–41. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy. (First publ. 1926.) 110 Donna Campbell Simpson, Claude M. (1960). The Local Colorists: American Short Stories, 1857–1900 . New York: Harper. Sundquist, Eric J. (1988). “Realism and Regional-ism.” In Emory Elliott (ed.), Columbia Literary History of the United States , 501–24. New York: Columbia University Press. Thayer, William R.

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  Violet America

  Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction

  • Jason Arthur(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky against the bulk of the world. —James Agee, “The American Roadside” Regional Cosmopolitanism Quite a bit of recent critical attention has been paid to American regional fiction.1 This attention, however, hasn’t changed the fact that regionalism is still considered the backwoods cousin of realism or that American lit-erature survey courses still include only a micro-unit on “Local Color,” in which short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett or Charles Chesnutt appear. Jewett and Chesnutt deserve their place in the canon, and they treat rural America in subtle, nuanced ways, but they are typically considered curators of provincial America.2 Their stories get understood as textual artifacts of extinct places and people. Their settings are the lands just beyond the reach of industrial development, and their heroes, like Jewett’s Sylvia or Ches-nutt’s Uncle Julius, are heroic in their attempts to stave off progress. Their attempts, alas, are always futile: Sylvia’s pact with the white heron won’t keep the armed ornithologist out of the forest forever, and Julius’s conjure tale won’t fool a single carpetbagger. Literary regionalism is a genre whose job it is to verify the imminent disappearance of its subject. xii introduction Against this assumption, Violet America will show that regional fiction is more cosmopolitan: it is more invested in articulating commonalities across cultures than it is in articulating differences. Regional fiction is alive and vital, and it is central to American fiction, not a tributary of nostalgia and quaintness. In fact, a spirit of regional cosmopolitanism persists in a good deal of American literary fiction since the Great Depression. This spirit reveals the interdependence and resemblance of otherwise disparate strands of American culture. It tends to resist such polarizing heuristics as the “red state / blue state” cultural geography of the twenty-first century.

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