| Drawing on tourist literature, travelogues, and local-color fiction about theSouth, Bill Hardwig tracks the ways in which the nation's leading interdisciplinary periodicals,especially the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the Century,translated and broadcast the predominant narratives about the late-nineteenth-century South. In many ways, he attests, the national representation of the South was controlled more firmly byperiodical editors working in the Northeast, such as William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich,and Richard Watson Gilder, than by writers living in and writing about the region. Fears aboutnational unity, immigration, industrialization, and racial dynamics in the South could be exploredthrough the safe and displaced realm of a regional literature that was often seen as mereentertainment or as a picturesque depiction of quaint rural life. The author examines in depth theshort work of George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lafcadio Hearn,Mary Noailles Murfree, and Thomas Nelson Page in the context of the larger periodical investment inthe South. Arguing that this local-color fiction calls into question some of the lines ofdemarcation within U.S. and southern literary and cultural studies, especially those offered byidentity-based models, Hardwig returns these writers to the dynamic cultural exchanges withinlocal-color fiction from which they initially emerged. |
