Local color fiction
Local Color Fiction ( local color movement ) is a branch of American literature representing the 19th century, the regional style with great attention to detail and new social realistic, naturalistic and socially critical design elements in the literature earned, without sacrificing social and romantic and sentimental motives. Characteristic are u. a. the use of dialect and the precise description of landscapes, milieus and folklore from the authors' personal experience, e.g. B. the milieus of gold diggers or cowboys .
features
A setting in which a - often remote - region or landscape plays a central role is typical of local color fiction. These regions are mostly far from the centers of power. Unlike in European realism, questions of political and economic power are not discussed.
The characters are shaped by the region and are more stereotypical than individual; they often speak dialect. Eccentric characters appear that are drawn like caricatures. The heroines , on the other hand, are mostly young women. The plot is seldom pronounced; often only regional customs (with a certain nostalgia ) or irritating details are described. Occasionally the resistance to the change that is breaking in from outside is described, as the regions are affected by economic change despite their isolation (gold rush, slave liberation, railway construction, introduction of new objects of use and technologies, etc.). The narrator often takes on the position of a cosmopolitan observer who is compelled, for example, by an involuntary interruption of his journey, to get involved in regional customs.
Classification in literary history
Inspired by the village stories of Harriet Beecher Stowe from New England and by Edward Eggleston's descriptions of the life of farmers in the Midwest , the movement after the American Civil War spread to the middle and deep south of the USA, but also California and other regions. The Local Color Fiction was also influenced by the Old South Western Humor , accumulating in by opponents Jackson in Tennessee , Alabama , Mississippi and Arkansas written sketches and anecdotes reflected in newspapers and later the work of Mark Twain ( The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County , 1865) and William Faulkners coined.
While southern local color fiction was aimed almost exclusively at male readers, the New England branch primarily addressed female readers. There was also a local color fiction of the Midwest and the Great Plains .
Local Color Fiction was said to have had a balancing and conciliatory effect in the post-civil war period. The urban middle classes were able to identify with the people in the rural regions. At the same time, the movement shows the increasing differentiation and segmentation of American society, which is to become even more evident in the subsequent literary period of social realism.
Local color fiction is often viewed as a variety of literary regionalism , which in Latin America corresponds to the somewhat earlier dominant Costumbrismo or Gauchismo .
Important representatives and genres
While the most important works of Local Color Fiction were in the form of novels , the short stories in particular were distributed en masse through magazines such as Scribner's Monthly, founded in 1870, or newspapers such as the Picayune from New Orleans. Longer verses and poems were also written, for example by Irwin Russell (1853–1879), who wrote in the dialect of Irish-Scottish workers or freed slaves on the Mississippi .
The most important representatives of the local color movement are Bret Harte ( The Outcasts of Poker Flat , 1870) and George Washington Cable et al. a. Joel Chandler Harris , Sidney Lanier , Hamlin Garland , Thomas Nelson Page , Mary Noailles Murfree (pseudonym: Charles Egbert Craddock), Mark Twain and O. Henry .
African-American authors such as Charles W. Chesnutt are also part of the current. Chesnutt's tale The Goophered Grapevine was the first African American tale to be published in Atlantic Monthly Magazine (1887); it describes in satirical form the slavery on the plantations of the south, especially by Thomas Nelson Page, literarily transfigured (the plantation tradition ) with its evocation of the good ole times .
literature
- Sacvan Berkovic (Ed.): Cambridge History of American Literature , Cambridge University Press, vol. 2 & 3
- Horst Ihde : Epilogue to George W. Cable, Tite Poulette , Leipzig: Insel 1986, pp. 130 ff.
- Amy Kaplan: Nation, Region, and Empire , in: Columbia History of the American Novel, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 240-266.
- Henry Lüdeke: History of American Literature , Bern, Munich: Francke Verlag, 1963
Individual evidence
- ^ Regionalism and Local Color Fiction, 1865-1895 on Washington State University website
- ^ Washington State University website
- ^ Amy Kaplan : The Social Construction of American Realism. University of Chicago Press 1988.
- ↑ Kaplan 1991, p. 244.