Regionalism

Often included within Realism and Naturalism to indicate literature that is regional in narration and/or dialect. Regional writing is not necessarily associated with a historical period, and extends to present day as a style of fiction.

Characteristics of Regionalism:

• characters speak in the local dialect

• often associated with southern writers like Twain, Chopin, and William Faulkner, etc.

• setting is a particular "region" of the country where local customs and traditions are an integral part of the story

• present day - not futuristic or historical

In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography – of a particular region. American Literary Regionalism has been the subject of scholarship for the past several decades and has been a central site for scholarly debate on a variety of methodologies including Feminism and New Historicism. This sub-field of American literary studies has been traditionally located in the late-nineteenth century.

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". 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”. Josephine Donovan connects regionalist, or local color, literature to specific realistic representations. She specifies the genre as "depict[ing] authentic regional detail, including authentic dialect, authentic local characters, in real or realistic geographical settings.”

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.

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."

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". 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.

US Regional Writers

New England regional writers

• Stephen King

• Harriet Beecher Stowe

• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

• Harry Baughlicher

• Sarah Orne Jewett

Southern regional writers

• William Faulkner

• Harper Lee

• Mark Twain

• Charles W. Chesnutt

• Kate Chopin

Midwestern regional writers

• Willa Cather

• E.W. Howe

• James Whitcomb Riley

• Sinclair Lewis

Western & Others

• Bret Harte

• David Lee, Utah

• Kyle McCormick

• John Steinbeck, Central California

Slave narrative

The slave narrative is a literary form which grew out of the written accounts of enslaved Africans in Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada and Caribbean nations. Some six thousand former slaves from North America and the Caribbean gave accounts of their lives during the 18th and 19th centuries, with about 150 narratives published as separate books or pamphlets. In the 1930s in the United States, during the Great Depression, additional oral narratives on life during slavery were collected by writers sponsored and published by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration.

Some of the earliest memoirs of enslavement were written by white Europeans and Americans captured and enslaved in North Africa, usually by Barbary pirates. These were part of a broad category of "captivity narratives", which later included accounts by colonists and American settlers in North America and the United States who were captured and held by Native Americans. Several well-known ones were published before the American Revolution. Later accounts were by Americans captured by western tribes during 19th century migrations.

In addition, the division between slaves and prisoners of war, for example, was not always clear. A broader name for the genre is "captivity literature". As more attention is paid to the problem of contemporary slavery in the 20th and 21st centuries, additional slave narratives are written and published.