TY - JOUR TI - The world of regionalism DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T35M63R7 PY - 2013 AB - In order to understand American regionalist aesthetics, we must look abroad. This dissertation tells the story of nineteenth-century regionalism as a locally-specific textual expression of a transnational problem, specifically a problem of vision. A critical preoccupation with the relays between region and nation in regionalist texts has diverted attention away from the transatlantic circulation of aesthetic styles within which American regionalism took shape, thereby producing a narrow view of the formal properties of regionalist texts. By excavating these neglected aesthetic contexts, I show that nineteenth-century anxieties about the arbitrary and conditional nature of human perception—anxieties that both permeated various art forms and transcended national boundaries—are constitutive elements of regionalist literary form. Regional sources constitute a particularly vibrant archive that speaks to how American literature of the late nineteenth century became a site for the circulation of a strikingly modern aesthetic grammar—one that regionalist writers not only drew upon but were actively engaged in developing. Regionalist writers such as George Washington Cable, Washington Irving, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and Constance Fenimore Woolson were deeply engaged with aesthetic preoccupations that transcended national concerns. Regionalism therefore resonates with contemporaneous innovations in European fine arts—Impressionism, Paul Cézanne’s landscape paintings—as well as with avant-garde French performance art and the bohemian fin-de-siècle. Attending to regionalism’s investment in the scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic explorations of the problem of vision enables a new way of categorizing the literary production of this transitional period of American literature. By making local color writing recognizable as a visual problem, I draw together unfamiliar constellations of texts by means of their relationships to visual styles, visual technologies, and aesthetic movements. Mark Twain’s mode of vision in his foreign travel writing aligns with the disintegrative visual experience of Impressionist representations; George Washington Cable’s magazine writing echoes French Orientalist painting and the gestural language of Parisian cabaret performers; and Mary Murfree’s landscape descriptions resonate with Paul Cézanne’s late landscapes. These case studies add a new layer to our understanding of regionalism in a postnational context. KW - Literatures in English KW - Regionalism--United States KW - Landscape painting, American--19th century KW - Regionalism in literature LA - eng ER -