Particular places: Local color writing in the United States, 1870-1910.

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs the original scope, diversity, and popularity of late 19th-century local color writing. Regional writing in the United States--an ostensibly rooted local form--offered a range of highly mutable, mobile and often contradictory ways of mediating between regional, national, and international audiences. Genteel, feminine sketches of New England village life shared their cultural moment with often highly masculinized Western, Midwestern, and Southern texts marketed by writers who were variously allied with the traditions of humor, ethnography, travel narratives, and the problem novel. A genre which has been characterized as aesthetically refined--a minor form of highbrow art--was also characterized by celebrities, stunts, and national bestsellers. The first three chapters of this dissertation focus on originary moments in the history of local color, reevaluating Harriet Beecher Stowe (and the literary tradition ascribed to her influence) in the context of several now all-but-forgotten regional celebrities like Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Edward Eggleston, and Mary Noailles Murfree. The fourth chapter considers the relationships of two well-known writers--Sarah Orne Jewett and Charles Waddell Chesnutt--to the local communities which would become their primary subject matter. Jewett's artistry was supported by an extensive transcontinental network of female friends; Chesnutt's journals and earliest writings illustrate his growing awareness of potential audiences and market opportunities, and his belief that regional writing could be a vehicle for intervention in ongoing literary constructions of identity, region, and race. Chapter Five addresses the uses of tourist characters in local color stories; Chapter Six is a close study of a novel centered on a teacher, Sarah Pratt McLean's Cape Cod Folks. The dual figures of the tourist and the teacher demonstrate the two impulses central to the genre; that is, the desire to assimilate and the desire to create difference.