Modernism in Appalachian Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-224
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Specific Reaction ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
Community History ◽  
Urban Rural

Regional or ethnic modernists maintained a focus on history—especially community history—and wrote about rural, regional, or ethnic cultures. Although some regional modernists experimented with literary style, among the Appalachian modernists literary experimentation tends to be subtle. Regional modernists differed in their response to the urban/rural divide and often found themselves wrestling with issues of cultural representation. Like mainstream modernism, there was pushback against the romanticism of the previous era, but the response of Appalachian modernists is a specific reaction to the tradition of nineteenth-century travel and local color writing in which mountain culture had been misrepresented at worst and sugar coated by sympathetic intermediaries at best.

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Peripheral Position

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

Reverie, Schmaltz, and the Modernist Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-363
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kieffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
French Music ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Harmonic Language

Abstract In a review of 1895, Henry Gauthier-Villars described Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as “musique de rêve,” a descriptor that has been attached to Debussy’s style ever since. Partly because of the importance of the Prélude within his compositional development, the distinctive sound of Debussy’s “dream music” has often been understood as a response to the hermetic and difficult literary style of French Symbolists, especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé. Yet Gauthier-Villars’s appellation of “musique de rêve” also invoked a specifically sonic (and largely forgotten) set of cultural reference points, an aural backdrop crucial for understanding Debussy’s early style in the 1880s and early 1890s—the widespread cultivation of the topos of reverie in French music in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Settings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé by Debussy and his young contemporaries around 1890 were infused with signifiers of dream and reverie that trace back to salon genres of the 1870s and that cross-pollinated with the harmonic language of the newly fashionable valse lente in the early 1880s. Hearing Debussy’s early works in the context of this reverie topos and its aural kinship to the popular valse lente sheds light on the extent to which the radical idiosyncrasy so vaunted by modernists was constantly evolving in tandem with—and could never truly free itself from—an aural culture defined by mass production, repetition, and cliché.

Twenty-First-Century Appalachian Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 487-488
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
The Core ◽  
Globalizing World ◽  
Twenty First Century

Although Appalachia and its authors resist political definition and economic category, one can say that twenty-first century Appalachian writers attempt to define what changes and what endures in a rapidly globalizing world. As Pulitzer Prize finalist Maurice Manning has noted, at the core of Appalachian literature is a tension between an appreciation of the region and an “anxiety for legitimacy”; this observation reflects the challenges facing authors from a region still often seen as “other” by the broader American culture. Some contemporary Appalachian authors explore which traditions are worth preserving and which ones should fall by the wayside, while others consider how to preserve and expand their Appalachian identity, a process that they sometimes connect with preservation and innovation in literary style. In short, many twentieth-century Appalachian authors cultivate in their readers an appreciation of Appalachian perspectives from a self-aware otherness that is sometimes tradition tethered yet is willing to go far beyond received notions about the region.

scholarly journals The politics of place: Regionalism and local color fiction in nineteenth-century U.S. literature

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Kari Meyers Skredsvig
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Politics Of Place

Este artículo es el primero de una serie dedicada a las relaciones entre autoria femenina y la noción de lugar/espacio en la literatura estadounidense. Se presenta un panorama general a fin de contextualizar el regionalismo y el localismo como movimientos literarios y como subgéneros literarios en el desanollo de la literatura estadounidense del siglo diecinueve, mediante el análisis de los contextos históricos, sociales, políticos y literarios que inicialmente propiciaron estas dos tendencias literarias y posteriormente influyeron en su desaparición. También se examina el contenido cultural y aporte literario de estas etiquetas, así como la posibilidad de intercambiarlas.

Early Appalachian Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
William Bartram ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The texts collected here describe late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Appalachia as a geographical and political frontier and include Cherokee narratives, works by pioneers and frontiersmen and Native Americans who assimilated into European culture, revealing how this borderland became a cultural, rhetorical, and mythical frontier. The selections also include Enlightenment, Euro-American views of Appalachia from men such as Thomas Jefferson and William Bartram.

Town and Country in nineteenth-century germany: A review of urban-rural differentials in demographic behavior

1977 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Knodel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Demographic Data ◽  
Vital Statistics ◽  
Large Cities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Demographic Behavior ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Industrial Societies

In recent decades historians have become increasingly interested in utilizing the approaches of quantitative social sciences to aid their understanding of the past. One aspect of social life that lends itself well to quantitative study is demographic behavior and indeed historical demography has been flourishing. Although the questions posed by social historians inevitably transcend purely demographic issues, a firm knowledge of demographic conditions can be a valuable asset in the pursuit of a broader understanding of society in past times.For the latter part of the nineteenth century, a critical period in the transformation of western European populations into modern urban-industrial societies, abundant demographic data are available in the relatively easily accessible published census and vital statistics reports. Because nineteenth-century statisticians and bureaucrats considered the urban-rural division as a fundamental and meaningful delineation of society, statistical bureaus throughout Europe tabulated a large number of statistics, including those derived from censuses and vital registration, according to some scheme of urban-rural classification and frequently provided separate tabulations for individual large cities. In addition, a number of contemporary scholars wrote articles and monographs utilizing these data. * Together these sources can be particularly useful for assessing the differences between urban and rural conditions of life at a time when cities and towns were beginning to claim an increasing share of a country’s population.

Writing Appalachia

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Prescription Drug Abuse ◽  
White People ◽  
Local Color ◽  
Mountaintop Removal ◽  
Appalachian Literature ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Selection Of

From the earliest oral traditions to print accounts of frontier exploration, from local color to modernism and postmodernism, from an exuberant flowering in the 1970s to its high popular and critical profile in the twenty-first century, Appalachian literature can boast a long tradition of delighting and provoking readers. Yet, locating an anthology that offers a representative selection of authors and texts from the earliest days to the present can be difficult. Katherine Ledford and Theresa Lloyd have produced an anthology to meet this need. Simultaneously representing, complicating, and furthering the discourse on the Appalachian region and its cultures, this anthology works to provides the historical depth and range of Appalachian literature that contemporary readers and scholars seek, from Cherokee oral narratives to fiction and drama about mountaintop removal and prescription drug abuse. It also aims to challenge the common stereotypes of Appalachian life and values by including stories of multiple, often less heard, viewpoints of Appalachian life: mountain and valley, rural and urban, folkloric and postmodern, traditional and contemporary, Northern and Southern, white people and people of color, straight and gay, insiders and outsiders—though, on some level, these dualisms are less concrete than previously imagined.

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