Spring ’20: ENGL 576 – American Regionalism

Professor Mike Duvall
**Fulfills the American Literature requirement
Meets at the College of Charleston, Wednesday 6-8:45

This course examines the literary history, conventions, and cultural concerns of regional writing (also sometimes called “local color”) in the US at the end of the 19th century via extensive reading of the primary texts (mostly short fiction) and relevant criticism and scholarship on regionalism. By all accounts, regionalism was a central strand of American literature, so its study is indispensable for understanding American literary culture both in the period and as a whole. Regional/local color writing addressed some of American culture’s dominant areas of concern at the turn of the last century: gender, race, class, sexuality, immigration, labor, urbanization, and nationalism, to name a few.

American regionalists in the late 19th century include well-known figures like Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mark Twain, but a whole host of other less-often discussed, but highly-successful writers participated in the regional mode of writing, and their work, too, will repay our close attention many fold.

Studying regionalism is not simply, in the end, to study the peculiarities of locations–-say, the Tennessee Mountains, the Maine Coast, the Mid-West, or the Yukon–-but to study America itself at a critical, transformative moment in our history. Turning our attention to the development of the regional mode of writing at the end of the 19th century also equips us to critically engage with the regional modes of representation we continue to see deployed in contemporary literature, film, and television.

Image: ©  Brown Road Going To The Mountain Photography

 

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