Text

theses

External ETD doctoral

Reading Regions combines literary, historical, and computational analysis to argue that the emergence of a nationally-incorporated cultural field after the Civil War galvanized regional differences rather than subsuming them. Americans relied on the concept of regions to make sense of geographic disparities in social, economic, and aesthetic practices. Noting the postbellum centralization of publishing and integration of transportation, scholars have taken attentiveness to regional particularity as the hallmark of a single “regionalism” that consolidated national taste around the consumption of imagined folk pasts. My project, however, illuminates extensive regional patterns of divergence in the local practices of reading and reprinting that underwrote national circulation. Americans read differently in different parts of the country, and catering to these differences shaped the dominant literary styles and media formats of the period. Tracing this dynamic relationship between reception and production demonstrates that literature not only described regional cultures but played a crucial mediating role in the process by which they were reproduced. Regions have continued to matter because meaning transforms as it travels, and in doing so etches furrows and valleys into the terrain of popular taste.

ETD_11702

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-9d7d-ry64

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