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The setting is particularly important in regional literature. In literature regionalism refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features, such as dialect, customs, history, and landscape, of a particular region (also called ''local colour''): "Such a locale is likely to be rural and/or provincial." 〔J.A Cuddon, ''A Dictionary of Literary Terms''. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p.560.〕 ==Conceptual Issues== Local color or regional literature is fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. Influenced by Southwestern and Down East humor, between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century this mode of writing became dominant in American literature. According to the ''Oxford Companion to American Literature'', "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (439). In his ''Cultures of Letters'' (1993) Richard Brodhead provides a short gloss on the genre: “It requires a setting outside the world of modern development, a zone of backwardness where locally variant folkways still prevail. Its characters are ethnologically colorful, personifications of the different humanity produced in such non-modern cultural settings. Above all, this fiction features an extensive written simulation of regional vernacular, a conspicuous effort to catch the nuances of local speech” (115-116). Josephine Donovan connects regionalist, or local color, literature to specific realistic representations. She specifies the genre as "depict() authentic regional detail, including authentic dialect, authentic local characters, in real or realistic geographical settings.”〔Donovan, Josephine ''New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition'' (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1983), 50.〕 Its weaknesses may include nostalgia or sentimentality. Its customary form is the sketch or short story, although Hamlin Garland argued for the novel of local color. Regional literature incorporates the broader concept of sectional differences, although Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have argued convincingly that the distinguishing characteristic that separates "local color" writers from "regional" writers is instead the exploitation of and condescension toward their subjects that the local color writers demonstrate.〔Campbell, Donna M. "Regionalism and Local Color Fiction, 1865-1895." http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/lcolor.html〕 One definition of the difference between realism and local color is Eric Sundquist's: "Economic or political power can itself be seen to be definitive of a realist aesthetic, in that those in power (say, white urban males) have been more often judged 'realists,' while those removed from the seats of power (say, Midwesterners, blacks, immigrants, or women) have been categorized as regionalists." See also the definition from the ''Encyclopedia of Southern Literature''.〔Campbell, Donna M. "Regionalism and Local Color Fiction, 1865-1895." http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/lcolor.html〕 Many critics, including Amy Kaplan ("Nation, Region, and Empire" in the ''Columbia Literary History of the United States'') and Richard Brodhead (''Cultures of Letters''), have argued that this literary movement contributed to the reunification of the country after the Civil War and to the building of national identity toward the end of the nineteenth century. According to Brodhead, "regionalism's representation of vernacular cultures as enclaves of tradition insulated from larger cultural contact is palpably a fiction . . . its public function was not just to mourn lost cultures but to purvey a certain story of contemporary cultures and of the relations among them" (121). In chronicling the nation's stories about its regions and mythical origins, local color fiction through its presence—and, later, its absence—contributed to the narrative of unified nationhood that late nineteenth-century America sought to construct.〔Campbell, Donna M. "Regionalism and Local Color Fiction, 1865-1895." http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/lcolor.html〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「American literary regionalism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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