New England Fiction

4 Key excerpts on "New England Fiction"

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  Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space

  Style, Landscape, Perception

  • David James(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Smuggling in recessive fantasies of repair, bucolic literature responds to Jean Baudrillard’s typically maudlin verdict that ‘when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning’. 13 When seen as a latter-day aesthetic solution to the pastoral lyric, rural realist fiction is beholden to a patently nationalistic cause. The process of classifying genres, then, solely in terms of their putative audience and political pertinence can result in the legitimization of certain modes of ‘literary fiction’ at the exclusion of others. Fiction from and about the provinces, is equally vulnerable to derogatory preconceptions. When its polemical scope is thus confined to normative ideas of the provincial imaginary as bounded, parochial or largely insensible to the dialectic between local and national concerns, the regional novel emerges as an inherently conservative genre: at best, relevant to indigenous issues and local upheavals alone; at worst, tacitly reviving a host of purely regressive demands. Recent trends in postcolonial criticism have ambivalently consolidated the sense in which regional fiction is conflated with Anglocentric nativism. Canvassing the ‘metonymic order of reasoning’ underlying the imperial cartographies of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (invoked by Said when turning to Jane Austen in Culture and Imperialism ), Ian Baucom points out that the local – hence the regional – invariably connects to the ‘contiguous territories’ leading out to Empire’s seemingly distant dominions. Spaces most emblematic of provincial Englishness thus resonate with those acquired under colonial juris-diction. Hailed on this model as yet another type of ‘region’ under English authority, colonial territory loses specificity by becoming figuratively equated with ‘little more than a suburb or outlying piece of countryside’.

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  Latin American Fiction

  A Short Introduction

  • Phillip Swanson(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The history of mainstream Latin American fiction in the early twentieth century will become a history, in other words, of flawed classics. Regionalism With regard to prose fiction, Regionalism became the dominant narrative form in the first few decades of the twentieth century. It is actually referred to by a variety of names: also, for example, as the novel of the land or novela de la tierra , as autochthonous fiction or sometimes criollista fiction. In Brazil, meantime, it is sometimes asso-ciated with a specific region, the drought-stricken north-eastern sertão or backlands, and tends to be more self-contained and identified largely with a kind of 1930s Neorealism focusing on human suffering. 4 The emergence of the regional novel has traditionally been explained in both literary and social terms. It has been seen, in part, as a reaction against what was perceived as an inherited European tradition of Romanticism and, perhaps later, official Realism. On the one hand, writers sought to escape the Romantic model by concentrating on what was uniquely Latin American (hence the regional emphasis). On the other hand, they equally wished to avoid the Dickensian or Galdosian model of Realism which seemed to deal mainly with urban life (again, it was the regions that marked Latin America’s difference from Europe). As has been seen, none the less, in practice National Narratives 24 much Romantic fiction in Latin America was very much concerned with national realities. And, at the same time, Regionalist writing did aim to be realistic in its documentation of regional ways of life. Regionalism can probably be more usefully understood as a con-tinuation and more explicit refinement of the national and continental post-Independence concerns of the nineteenth century in the form of novels for which there was something more of a literate, educated, national public (though underdeveloped in comparison to, say, north-western Europe).

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  New England Beyond Criticism

  In Defense of America�s First Literature

  • Elisa New(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  There are surely classrooms where this story is still being told. But the prestige of New England, in professional literary circles at least, has never been lower. Among the highest priorities of critics working in American literature in the second half of the twentieth century was the unseating of Protestant New England as the capital of American literary culture. As late as the 1960s, it was still axiomatic that the origins of American culture were to be found in this one region, its area extending north and east of Boston to the Canadian border, west and south of Boston to the Connecticut Valley, a region whose civilizational outline was already distinct by the end of the seventeenth century. Never mind this region's size relative to the vastness of the eventual United States. With its twin epicenters at Harvard and Yale, its links to high culture and high office, its roster of Adamses and Websters striding the national stage, this region of subcultures, frequently quite distinctive and frequently quite parochial – Separatist, Federalist, Abolitionist; Cantabridgean, Brahmin, WASP – somehow came to represent the quintessentially American.

  But by the time a New England (San Francisco born) icon, Robert Frost, got up on a January day in 1961 to offer poetic tribute to the New England born (Catholic) President, this era was nearly over. Starting in the 1970s, and gathering force through the 1980s and 1990s, a rigorous and exciting revisionist scholarship began to expose the cultural processes and ideological interests by which Pilgrim grit was identified with the national Spirit, the Protestant mind with the national idea, and the New England classic with literary excellence. Distinguished critics joined forces to show how, through sermons, pedagogy, and print networks, through academic dynasties and intellectual oligarchies and self-reinforcing ideological formations, New England's primacy and representativeness were invented, established, and packaged for wide distribution.

  Such scholars pointed out the obvious – that New England, an English outpost on a continent the French and Spanish had already explored, was not in any sense “first,” and so could not have struck the template for all American culture. The Americanness of New England literature was revealed as a fiction, a back formation, or, in the catchall phrase, an ideological construction. Indigenous peoples had long populated the “wilderness” which Spanish, French, and English settlers laid claim to, and those settlers were themselves proud subjects of European kingdoms. For its first one hundred and fifty years, New England was in every sense colonial: geographically removed, culturally in thrall. Early modern explorers might have found it expedient to call densely populated Indian lands “howling wilderness,” as, in subsequent decades, and then centuries, their descendants would find it similarly convenient to wrest national integrities, to claim national destinies, out of circumstances even more ambiguous. One simply had to overlook sea trade, slave trade, book trade, and sundry other transatlantic, trans-hemispheric, and transnational complications to claims of discrete and integral nationhood.

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  Sum of the Parts

  The Mathematics and Politics of Region, Place, and Writing

  • Kent C Ryden(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  41 But this act of latter-day imaginative imperialism was just as homogenizing, just as aggressive, and just as disempowering to those northern New Englanders who didn’t fit the idealized image as was the nineteenth-century colonial revival to the region’s new urban immigrants. Mill workers, the rural poor, and people of French Canadian descent, regardless of the vitality of their communities’ social and cultural lives, were imaginatively elbowed out of conceptual citizenship in their own states. In response to the ongoing extension and perpetuation of dominant conceptions of New England regional identity, many northern New England writers have taken on the role of partisans of place, writing their communi-ties firmly and vigorously into the regional literary imagination, in effect saying, These people are here too, and they have as much dig-nity and presence and right to be here as any other New Englander, if not more. In the face of the regional juggernaut, they elevate and celebrate the particulars of place, especially those places on the geo-graphical and social and cultural margins, attempting to make the New England of the mind and of the printed page more closely reflect s e t s a n d u n s e t t l e m e n t 4 8 the richness of the New England on the ground. Theirs is a deeply and pointedly political literature; in their pages they address what they see as the overt and covert injustice and imbalance in the idea of New England (and, implicitly, of regional identities in general) and attempt to redress the situation by trying to write a more fair and democratic literature in the service of a more fair and democratic re-gional life. Ernest Hebert, along with Carolyn Chute, is probably the most self-aware of northern New England’s literary partisans of place.

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