Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism

Abstract

Mark Storey, "Country Matters: Rural Fiction, Urban Modernity, and the Problem of American Regionalism" (pp. 192––213) This essay intervenes in the critical debates surrounding nineteenth-century American regionalism, arguing that such debates have tended to ignore the possibility of a shared and trans-regional category of "rural fiction." Developing this notion, I suggest that literary representations of rural life in the late nineteenth century are a crucial and neglected way of understanding the geographically indiscrete transformations of urban-capitalist modernity. Further, by examining these transformations through the prism of rural fiction, we can challenge the urban-centric tendency of postbellum American literary history. Drawing on several writers who have been the focus of much of critics' attentions on regionalism (Edward Eggleston, Hamlin Garland, and Sarah orne Jewett in particular), this essay considers both the generic and thematic instabilities of rural fiction, arguing that these instabilities serve to encode and refract the social and cultural context from which this fiction emerges. Reading rural fiction against the background of the increasing similarities between geographically distinct areas of rural life, and reconsidering many of the works that we currently gather under the regionalist rubric as, instead, rural, a distinct perspective can be gained on the standardizing and flattening processes of modernity itself.

Ethnography, Naturalism, and Paul Corey

“…The contrast between Dyson's and Corey's treatments and Miner's recalls the long‐running debate in anthropology between Oscar Lewis and Robert Redfield about their contrasting depictions of Mexican peasant life, clearly part of a wider discussion regarding naturalism as a style of writing in the US (e.g. Storey , note 3).…”

Hamlin Garland's Detour into Art Criticism: Forecasting the Triumph of Popular Culture over Populism at the End of the Frontier

“…Although for Garland such a project ultimately failed, Brown draws attention to a uniquely late nineteenth‐century moment when one “could imagine a cultural field that would be modernist … yet popular, nationalist and populist,” as opposed to the actual history of modernist fiction in the twentieth century, in which an “institutionalized antagonism between [‘high’ and ‘low’ culture] is precisely what obscure[d] populist culture from the aesthetic imagination” (99, 104–05). In an arguably allied fashion, Mark Storey attempts in “Country Matters” to reverse the earlier tendency of modernist critics to regard “regionalist” writers like Garland as merely “quaintly anachronistic” by recovering those moments in their novels that register social and political conflict, “buried but still‐glowing embers of the clamorous and transformative social world from which the novel emerges” (192). It is as though Storey adopts a perspective that actively looks for and thereby supplies the socially progressive bite otherwise missing in such fiction, a kind of critical salvage operation that Brown sees as an only marginally effective strategy of contemporary “politicized criticism” (even as it seems to be one of its only options), which tries to “recuperate ‘popular literature’ and ‘low culture’ for its subversive potential” (91)…”