Literature
Regional Fiction
Regional fiction is a literary genre that focuses on the customs, dialects, and landscapes of a particular region. It often portrays the lives of ordinary people and their struggles within the context of their environment. This genre is popular in American literature, with notable examples including William Faulkner's works set in the American South.
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7 Key excerpts on "Regional Fiction"
eBook - PDF- 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.
eBook - PDF- Dominic Head(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
This blurring and blending of the serious and the middlebrow, which has been a central feature of novel publishing since the Second World War, may have had an important boost in the resurgence of rural fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. Rural writing, then – to the extent that it is often also regional – raises questions of identity and belonging. Where the regional element is less pronounced, there is usually a national significance, giving a larger context to issues concerning identity. The rural tradition can also explore the tension between local allegiances and broader allegiances, interrogating how regional belonging in the twentieth century is understood, and how it fits with national affiliation. If Regional Fiction often concerns itself with rural experience, it is also often concerned with the life of provincial towns in rural settings. As I have suggested, the obvious explanation for the apparent decline of the rural-regional novel in England through the twentieth century is that the perception of regionalism has eventually been diluted by the effects of new modes and routes of travel, and these changes have meant that regions are less self-contained than they were. However, the novel retains the capacity to record regional experience. Keith Snell has argued that the regional novel in Britain and Ireland – and especially England – has actually been on the increase since the 1980s, although this appraisal does depend on including urban fiction in the calculation. Snell’s authoritative definition of the regional novel 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’. Regional Fiction of this type will have a very specific cultural and social focus; but Snell also includes ‘fiction with a strong sense of local geography, topography or landscape’.
eBook - PDFViolet America
Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction
- Jason Arthur(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- University Of Iowa Press(Publisher)
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. Why is regionalism still considered and taught as a discrete, nostalgic literary period? The answer has something to do with how and where Regional Fiction became popular. Regional Fiction first appeared in late nineteenth-century periodicals. Scholars give two reasons for its popular-ity: (1) it soothed urban, middle-class anxieties about the demographic and topographic shifts brought about by late nineteenth-century waves of im-migration and industrialization, and (2) it consolidated the various regions of the U.S. while also underscoring the line between provincial zones and zones of high culture. As Stephanie Foote puts it, regional writing “rep-resented various sections of the consolidating nation to an audience that was conscious of itself as a national elite” (4). By creating what Richard Brodhead calls a “mentally possessible version of a loved thing lost in real-ity,” regional writing speeds up the process of pushing provincial people and places off social and political landscapes and onto a more strictly fic-tional landscape (“Regionalism,” 155). Hence the idea of Regional Fiction as a curio cabinet — a literary genre wherein endangered folks and folkways get stuffed and displayed. Yet as Tom Lutz argues in Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004), Regional Fiction is more than a container of weird, old America.
eBook - PDF- Wendy Griswold(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
While different regions provide different materials, regionalist writing from anywhere presents some common characteristics. The works that are most readily recognized as “regionalism” share features that amount to a fam-ily resemblance. The most important literary expressions of the regional aesthetic are: Rural or small-town settings Working-class or rustic characters, depicted as tough, unyielding, traditional Closely observed descriptions of land, weather, flora, fauna, folkways Plots driven by conflict between insiders and outsiders; outsiders (often urban) are agents of change who threaten local way of life Reference to the past, to simpler ways now disappearing Tension over insider/outsider differences in reading, writing, educa-tion, intellectual sophistication The last takes two forms: one in which locals express a deep sus-picion of reading, writing, and/or education, and the other, its op-posite, in which the locals, who have been dismissed by the out-siders as rubes, display their learning or cleverness. These six, the markers of the regionalist literary aesthetic, are almost always pre-sent in regional novels. Naturally, even those writers who satisfy the regionalist aes-thetic criteria in some of their work do not invariably write in the regional mode. Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, for ex-ample, wrote The Growth of the Soil, a regionalist classic depicting hardscrabble life in the interior northern Norway. Its protagonist 19 . Unlike her sonnets, some of Millay’s early poetry, especially the title poem of her first collection, Renascence, did have some Maine content. 22 Chapter One wrests a farm out of the wilderness; its drama involves unsettling visitors and fateful trips the farmer or his wife make outside the region; it is rich with description of rural people’s struggles with the elements and with each other.
eBook - PDF- Benjamin Kohlmann, Matthew Taunton(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Literary Geographies As early as 1942, Yorkshire novelist Phyllis Bentley attempted to define the English regional novel. 10 In a thin pamphlet produced on wartime econ- omy paper, Bentley asserts that national cultures with ‘considerable diver- sity’ provide the richest materials for regional novels and names as a source of Britain’s diverse cultures its ‘amazing’ geological diversity (11). Fiction, for Bentley, is a matter of local geography, for ‘wherever the rock changes, the soil changes, the crops and cattle change, the industry changes, and the manners and customs of the people tend to be different too’ (12). Her interest in the impacts of physical materials on production and reception of diverse kinds of regional novels complements her contemporary F. W. Morgan’s interest in the less concrete differences of ‘regional con- sciousness’. Writing in 1939, Morgan argues that the ‘true regional novel represent[s] “people at work as an essential material; it has become almost the epic of the labourer”’. 11 The priorities of Bentley and Morgan – regional life, labour and rocks (or, more elegantly, cultural and physical geography) – provide one frame- work guiding the analyses and interpretations that follow. Historians of interwar rural England provide another. They document crises of 20 kristin bluemel agriculture intensified by new patterns of global imports from Canada, Australia and Argentina that forced many farmers to abandon their arable fields to grazing and take up dairy farming. 12 Many rural labourers and bankrupted aristocrats had already given up their lands and occupations, leaving for cities during the agricultural depressions that characterised much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
- Robert D. Rhode(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
He may work from two independent sources and still be able to achieve a single emo-tional effect. Regardless of the truth concerning the source of feelings for nature, they must be recognized as something more than literary conventions or habits. James Lane Allen's stories, for example, show a passion for trees and birds reminiscent of animism, hylo-zoism, and other ancient mystic cults. Though such elements clash with the Darwinian tone he sometimes assumes, they illustrate the wide range which the local colorists used in their search for novel uses of setting. Regionalism, Local Tradition, and Atmosphere Regionalism, a term often applied to local color literature, should be 42 The Art and Business of Story Writing (New York, 1912). 28 INTRODUCTION distinguished from sectionalism, which refers usually to an aggressive, political, or patriotic interest in some part of the country and is propagandistic in tone. Regionalism, which is now applied mainly to a new movement of the present century, provides a legitimate subject matter for literature. 43 Donald Davidson has defined regional literature in part as a self-conscious expression of the life of a region, which may exploit intimate and local aspects of its scene, thus recovering the 'usable past' so much referred to. 4 4 If regionalism is to be defined, however, as Allen Tate defines it, as only the immediate, organic sense of life in which a fine artist works, 45 it may hardly be distinguished from its nineteenth cen-tury prototype. Both movements produced literature pertaining to particular regions. The contemporary movement is generally recognized as an offspring of the local color movement, differing from its parents by greater depth and a superior sense of tradition.
- James Smith(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
This chapter develops previous work on 1930s rural and regional novels by focussing on the language of seeing and looking that characterises not only how critics describe novels – in terms of landscape and scene – but also how authors structure readers’ vision of rural and regional geographies. In short, it makes the difference between land and landscape central to its investigation of rural regional novels of the 1930s. How are we taught to see the land? As an artist would, as landscape? Or as a farmer would, as land? What perspectives are we adopting, guided by agreeable, sympathetic first- person or invisible third-person narrators who ask us to assimilate our The Regional and the Rural 163 vision to theirs? Do we see from above, as from the top level of a motor bus, as from an aeroplane or balloon? Or are we taught to see the rural topography from eye level, as would a farmer walking the land or a schoolteacher walking to work? For purposes of this chapter about fictions that reflected and shaped the 1930s cult of the countryside, the most representative regional rural novels are those whose narrators primarily ask us to regard rural places as land, as something vital, dynamic, and changing – alternately dangerous and generous, something to be lived on and from which to derive one’s living. This distinguishes the rural novel from novels that are set in rural places but whose characters regard the rural as landscape, something remote that can be viewed from a distance, aestheticised, stabilised, and appreciated. Rural novels primarily represent a countryside of produc- tion, rather than a countryside that offers itself up for consumption, visual or otherwise.
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