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Juan Jose Saer and his champions have long resisted labeling his novels regional-ist literature. I contend, however, that recognizing Saer’s intervention in this tradition is essential to appreciating the political stakes of the radical formal experiments for which the author is known. This paper argues that in El limo-nero real (1974), Saer disrupts codes of representation that have long imagined Argentina’s rural interior as an ahistorical landscape. Instead, the narrative foregrounds the shared time of experience as that which allows the reader to know (conocer) regional life. By weaving movement into the past and future into the act of looking, Saer’s narrative gaze insists that time is integral to vision: it is only by gathering fragmentary visions from disparate moments that one is able to see and make sense of the whole. Saer’s temporally protracted narration ultimately demands a deeper form of ethical engagement from the reader. Instead of simply looking at the region and taking in its local color, the reader is asked to inhabit the space and time of the world represented. In this way, Saer’s avant-garde poetics challenge nationalistic progress narratives invested in displacing regional spaces into archaic time and invite critical reflection on how such spaces are viewed and consumed by a cosmopolitan readership.

If you were to cut away the frame from Clarence Major's My Amputations - lopping off the memoirs (whether real or imagined), the slapstick crime story, the fantasies borrowed from pom movies and spy novels - you would be left with the story of a writer on a lecture tour. Mason Ellis, who bounces from city to city across three continents, spends most of his fictional life encountering new forms of food and drink, new landscapes and traffic patterns, new audiences and colleagues and policemen before whom he must explain himself. Under the circumstances, even a character more self-assured than Mason might begin to feel disoriented. Try it yourself. The text of My Amputations is broken into discontinuous fragments, much as a traveling lecturer's time and space are fractured, so that you pick your way through the pieces - some as short as one-third of a page, none longer than eight pages - with a feeling that reality has become unreliable. At any moment, the people you were so busy with might disappear, as you find yourself plunged without transition into a new setting. Your experience as a reader of My Amputations mimics the protagonist's experience; but at the same time, you also stand apart from Mason, playing the role of audience - puzzled, entertained, appalled - during his improbable performances. If you think of the various sections of the book as lectures, then it's also fair to say that the novel provides accompanying slide illustrations. As Mason careens from place to place, appropriate descriptions of works of art pop up in the background. While he is in France, images by Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh flash before you. When Mason moves on to Germany, the images change - you see pictures by George Grosz and Edvard Munch, and perhaps a few stills from a Fritz Lang film. The Italian leg of the tour comes illustrated by Modigliani and the Venetian masters; the trip through Greece involves much wandering through archeological sites and the halls of museums. When last seen, Mason has aU but merged with a work of visual art. He sits in a Liberian village, hidden behind a wooden mask. Considering this abundance of references, it is risky to give precedence to any one artist or style of art in My Amputations. Because there is little m of hierarchy, the reader can't easily decide which details might be thematic and which are merely local color. Then again, that sense of undecidability might itself be one of the book's themes. My Amputations has as its subject a narrator, an "I" presumably the contemporary African-American author Clarence Major). The book's object, or "ME," is its protagonist, a contemporary African-American madman named Mason Ellis. It is Mason's principal delusion that he is the author; his place, he believes, has been by a contemporary African American with the initials C.M. So much for the certainties of My Amputations. Beyond them, we get onto slippery footing. Is the book's "ME" trying to supplant its "I"? Or is the book's "I" (a respectable fellow, with academic credentials) trying to separate himself from the disreputable, low-life "ME"? Why is the biography of the former so teasingly similar to that of the latter? And who is this poor stiff C.M., other than an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire between "I" and "ME"? These shifting, undecidable relationships among "I," "ME," and C.M. are of a piece with the shifting fragmented world of My Amputations. Withing that world, with its many cultural citations, there is only one type of art that provides a counterpart to such willful uncertainty: Cubism. I don't say that Cubism is of any use in explaining the book. Cubism has never been much good for explaining anything. But if we abandon the notion that there might be a code to My Amputations - the false hope that we might somehow translate the book into a straightforward set of propositions - then we might also see that Cubism is at work in the novel, encouraging just such an abandonment. …

TOWARD THE BEGINNING OF HIS EXTRAORDINARY BOOK, A BOEING 747 pilot (and former historian-in-training) introduces the term place lag, a counterpart to jet lag. Pilots rarely experience jet lag, Mark Vanhoenacker maintains, because they keep their watches and cell phones, as well as their schedules of eating and sleeping, attuned to the home time zone. They experience place lag regularly. If place lag were a term in common use, he reflects, "the next time I walked down a street in Tokyo and a van blaring political announcements for a municipal election went past, or I stood in a food market in Sao Paulo and saw a dozen fruits I did not know how to name or eat, or the skies opened in Lagos and I saw rain the likes of which I would never see in Massachusetts, I could blink and say to my companion, who would nod and smile in recognition: 'I have place lag.'" In what must count as heresy for an airline pilot, he suggests that some cities "should never be joined by a nonstop flight" because they are "so different in sensibility, culture, and history." (1) Vanhoenacker defines place lag as "the imaginative drag that results ... from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our airplanes." (2) Novelists and other fiction writers understand that deep old sense and the need of human beings for it. A story would be "unrecognizable as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else," Eudora Welty insisted in her celebrated essay about place in fiction, even while she rejected the concept of "'regional' writing." "The very notion of moving a novel brings ruder havoc to the mind and affections than would a century's alteration in its time." While it is a commonplace that the Mississippi River is a main character in Huckleberry Finn, that does not mean that Mark Twain was a regional writer or a purveyor of local color. Twain would probably have agreed with Eudora Welty in dismissing regional as an outsider's careless and condescending term. (3) William Faulkner once remarked, "I'm inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me"--a startling claim, on the surface. What he meant was that what is important in human history, being universal, may be written about any place. But, in order to write about any other place, he would need to know that other place--its people, its landscape, its history--as well as he knew the South, since he did not "have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time." (4) Not long after I read Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring, I learned from my sister that the French language has a word--de'paysement--for place lag. John Crowe Ransom could have been speaking of place lag when he identified nostalgia as "the complaint of human nature ... when it is plucked up by the roots from the place of its origin and transplanted in foreign soil, or even left dangling in the air." But he was speaking of something beyond place lag when he attributed to the voice of progress the advice, "Do not allow yourself to feel homesick; form no such powerful attachments that you will feel a pain in cutting them loose; prepare your spirit to be always on the move."5 He was speaking (though without using the term) of dysplacement, the subject of the present meditation. Place lag or de'paysement is an individual sense of disorientation at being removed from familiar or home country. Dysplacement--the prefix signifies "faulty," "difficult," "abnormal," or "bad," as in dyspepsia, dyslexia, or dystopia--is the destruction of place itself: the loss of a sense of identification with other persons through a shared connection to a geographical place. When dysplacement sets in, "[t]he conception of a place lodged in time and space, in which people share many of the same things, remember the same things," loses purchase, leaving in its wake a "country of exiles," in William Leach's unsettling phrase. (6) It is not only our airplanes but also our society itself that our "deep old sense of place" cannot keep up with. …

Tunisian writer Emna Belhaj Yahia’s novels depart from many of the patterns established by her peers in that they eschew certain conventions of local color and auto-exoticism in order to create new narrative worlds that blur the political and realistic framework of North African settings. While in her earlier novels Chronique frontaliere (1991) and L’Etage invisible (1996) she uses realistic settings and a critique of conditions in Tunisia, especially the ones affecting women, with her consecutive novels she sets a different tone, eliminating recognizable place and character names in order to create a dreamlike and unhomely new world where characters are free to explore new relationships, chronologies and urban spaces. This change is especially noticeable in Tasharej (2000). In her most recent Jeux de rubans (2011), she continues in this mode, although she also includes a focus on recent sociopolitical events. Her characters continue to freely choose their careers, garments and destinies, and make it clear that these choices merely represent the two possible sides of an unfurling ribbon. Homi K. Bhabha’s theories of border and world literature have provided useful tools in analyzing Emna Belhaj Yahia’s writings.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Let's go around the room and say where were from." It was my first day in a class called "Experiencing Appalachia" during my first year of college. "Raleigh," someone said. "Just outside of Charlotte," said another. "High Point." The professor continually nodded as the circle made its way to me. "Haywood County," I said. Her eyebrows raised in respect. My home was only about a hundred winding miles from the classroom in which I was sitting, but "Haywood County" suddenly became more than a place to me. It was a marker of identity. On day one of class, I learned that the region's boundaries have been constantly contested. I was told that migratory patterns explain some of the dialects of the mountains. And I came to understand that I was Appalachian. I knew that I was a mountain girl. My family had been in Haywood County for generations and one branch of my family tree started or stopped--depending on your perspective--when the Cherokee were marched through. But I had to take a class called "Experiencing Appalachia" to even know that I was Appalachian. To "experience" the region, we studied Foxfire magazines like those that had lined the bookshelves in my childhood living room. We practiced churning butter. We read about quilting. Some of this resonated with me because it was familiar. My Granny painstakingly taught me to quilt one summer, which mostly meant that I spent time watching her pull out all of my sloppy handwork. My Granny and Pa, who lived next door, canned homegrown tomatoes and green beans. I knew the difference between half-runners and blue lakes, and know of no sound more satisfying than the pop of lids sealing on the kitchen counter in the late afternoon. But there were plenty of Appalachian traditions that I did not know. And there was nothing markedly Appalachian that we did because we had to. It is true that I had eaten groundhog on camping trips and could name most of the local peaks by sight, but it is also true that I bought incense and spirulina at a health food store in Asheville. I ate more tempeh than I did fatback, and I loved Ani DiFranco and Doc Watson equally. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] After graduation, I moved to Boston and became, for the first time, an outsider. Like so many before me, it took leaving home to understand it. I suddenly saw details in contrast and became proud of my heritage. I grew tomatoes on the fire escape because it connected me to my Granny, whose tomatoes were a month ahead and a foot taller. As distance helped me understand what it meant to be from the mountains, I began to deeply miss them. I felt like Ivy Rowe in Lee Smith's Fair and lender Ladies who says that she's like her daddy because she needs a mountain to "set her eyes against." Yet while I was proud of my home, I was also learning that powerful stereotypes about Appalachia had arrived in places like Boston well before me and had influenced the way that even the most considerate people thought about me. The banjo lick from Deliverance backed many introductory conversations when I said where I was from. Instead of calling people out for their ignorance, I distanced myself from Haywood County. I laughed along. I waited longer and longer to reveal my background. I blended in. During this time, I applied to graduate school. In my visits to prestigious universities in Boston, I actively tried to "talk right" and hide my accent. One lingering linguistic marker caused me the most panic when I slipped. Long after I attached 'G's to my gerunds and bleached out the local color from my language, I stumbled over the word "on." When my mom told me to put my coat on, those words rhymed. She told me to call her when I was on the road. And those words rhymed. To my Appalachian tongue, "own" and "on" were pronounced exactly the same way. But not for the rest of the world, I learned. …

The 1890s reception of Emily Dickinson’s poetry has often been read in terms of lack. Critics assume that Dickinson’s style was too modern to be adequately appreciated, which left her in the realm of an ephemeral curiosity. This narrative, however, only offers partial insight into Dickinson’s short-lived 1890s popularity. The abstract nature of Dickinson’s language—a stylistic element closely associated with literary modernism—was recognized in the late nineteenth century, but was read as outdated. In a period in which local color, the realist subgenre of the geographically particular, was dominant, New England character was associated with a contrived attempt at being quaint. The work of Dickinson’s most famous New England poetic contemporaries of the 1860s, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to be viewed as exemplifying a faded type of local color. Their poetry was read as a verbal and ideological obsession with individualist form that carried little social import. In the 1890s, Dickinson’s poems were read through this biased interpretative lens. Dickinson’s poetry, however, characterizes the local as a dynamic point of intersectionality in which the supposed binary between the familiar and non-familiar is continuously unsettled. Only once Dickinson was de-regionalized in the early twentieth century could her work be heralded as anticipatory of modernism.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Charles Dullin (1885-1949) was not only one of the prominent figures of modern French theater, but also played a pivotal role in the French theater's interculturation of the East Asian theater. Dullin incorporated the ideas of the East Asian theater into his productions and, more importantly, into his theory of "theater of transposition." In so doing, he also directly inspired the next generation of French theater artists (Antonin Artaud and Jean-Louis Barrault) to take an interest in the East Asian theater. Dullins theory has not been appreciated and studied in the English-speaking world as thoroughly as Jacques Copeaus, Bertolt Brechts, and Vsevolod Meyerholds. Nor has his interest in the East Asian theater. But the role of the East Asian theater in the formation of Dullins theory, not in the least less important than it was in the formation of Copeaus, Brechts, and Meyerholds, merits a comprehensive and in-depth approach. Dullin's Experience of the Chinese Theater in His Early Career Charles Dullin's contact with the East Asian theater, specifically, the Chinese theater, began as early as 1908 when he performed as an actor in VAvare chinois, a comedy in four acts and six scenes, translated and adapted by Judith Gautier from a thirteenth-century Chinese Yuan variety play (zaju), Khan thsian-nou (Kan qian nu, The Slave to the Treasures He Guards), by Zheng Tingyu. The adaptation was first produced by Andre Antoine at the Theatre National de L'Odeon on January 30, 1908. In the Odeon production, Charles Dullin played a "Sorcier" (Sorcerer) who appears and speaks only once. (1) In the original play, however, there is no such character. In the Yuan drama, the role type "Bu-er" refers to an old woman. In this play, it refers to the wife of the miser Gu Ren (or Kou-jin) when she first appears in the play. In this instance, Gautier apparently misread the Chinese character "bu" in the role type, as the same character also has the meaning "fortune-telling" that led to Gautier's translation of it as "Sorcier." But in the text of the play that follows, Gautier translated the role type correctly. Had Gautier translated the role type correctly the first time it appears in the play, the character's speech would have been assigned to the actress who played the miser's wife. Accidentally, Gautier's innocent mistake made possible Dullin's first performance in a Chinese play and his first taste of the Chinese theater and the East Asian theater as well. The production of L'Avare chinois was hailed as a great success not only for Gautier but also for the Odeon, its director Andre Antoine, and its players. (2) A revival of the play was scheduled shortly afterwards on February 6 to meet the demands of the audience. (3) Prior to the productions of the play, Gautier spoke extensively to the audience about the play and the Chinese theater in general. French critic Maximin Roll was greatly impressed by Gautier's thorough familiarity with her subject. (4) Gautier reminded her French audiences of the long history of the Chinese theater that had produced countless dramatic works as well as Chinas Molieres and Shakespeares whose genius had not been fully acknowledged by the Europeans. (5) Gautier's lectures must have benefited Dullin in his first encounter with the Chinese theater. As the director of the production, Andre Antoine "took pleasure in presenting with very particular care this curious comedy." (6) Antoine's production was characterized, as usual, by his meticulous attention to historical authenticity and local color and by his care for picturesqueness and for truth. (7) It was claimed as "the precise reconstitution of a theatrical performance in the Celestial-Empire." (8) Maximin Roll affirmed as a matter of fact that the artists at the Odeon had dedicated themselves to making the production "truly Chinese" from its mise en scene to its costuming. (9) According to Paul Leautaud (Maurice Boissard), L'Avare chinois was well played by the actors, "who knew the value of a gesture, a pose, a tone of voice, and who knew how to be, of appearance and tone, real Chinese. …

onstage and Twain's ability to arouse a "roar of laughter" through his portrayal of Jim, the slave character in Huck Finn. In this paper, I will examine the role of each author—Twain as the funny twin and Cable as the serious one—and argue that this pairing effaced Twain's connection to the south. The lecture tour's intentionally ironic name, "Twins of Genius," did not merely highlight the men's distinctions, but exaggerated those distinctions to the extent that Twain and Cable were cast as each other's antithesis. Therefore, anything associated with Cable— Creole culture, Jim Crow laws in the south, and the Confederate army—seemed contrary to Twain's onstage persona. Furthermore, I contend that the "Twins of Genius" tour was instrumental in establishing Twain's reputation as an American humorist by distinguishing him from Cable, his southern sidekick. It was this tour that shaped Twain's reputation, not as a local color novelist, but rather as a great American writer whose reputation H.L. Mencken best characterized as "the most noble figure America has ever given to English literature" (157). Cable's essay, "The Freedman's Case in Equity," was published during the tour and further emphasized the distinction between Twain as an American author and Cable as a regional personality. In the essay, Cable, a Louisiana native, incited controversy with his call to do away with the "purely arbitrary superiority of all whites over blacks" (412). Letters to editors began pouring into southern

One of the familiar conventions of nineteenth-century southern plantation short fiction is the frame narrative, featuring retrospective accounts by slaves or former slaves. The origin of this form, Victor Sejour's "The Mulatto," is the first short story by a U.S.-born African American. (1) Set in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti), "The Mulatto" inaugurated the pattern of using an embedded slave or former slave narrator who recounts a harrowing tale of oppression, inhumanity, and psychological suffering under bondage. The story was written in French and published in the March 1837 issue of the Parisian antislavery journal La Revue des Colonies, a monthly periodical owned and sponsored by a "society of men of color" (O'Neill 14). (2) A free man of color, a colonial mulatto, and a native of New Orleans, Sejour migrated to Paris to continue his education and to embark on a career of successful authorship, principally as a playwright, in an environment far less repressive than in the antebellum South (O'Neill 1). Frances Smith Foster, in noting Sejour's achievement as a playwright in France, sees this "as proof of international acclaim for a writer of African descent" (632). As the first work to treat the pattern of the atrocities of slavery in the plantation Americas, "The Mulatto" serves as an intertext for subsequent works that employ an embedded African American slave or former slave as a raconteur. One such text is Charles W. Chesnutt's dialect story "Dave's Neckliss," originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1889 and acclaimed by Richard Brodhead as "one of [Chesnutt's] most powerful works from any phase of his career," in that it "shows Chesnutt projecting both a more dignified, more capable black figure than elsewhere in the Uncle Julius tales" (17-18). While it seems doubtful that Chesnutt had ever read or even heard of Sejour's story, since it was not translated into English until 1995 for inclusion in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, still "The Mulatto" and "Dave's Neckliss" share key intersections. Both may be viewed within a postcolonial context in that they feature colonizers who exploit and victimize African slaves whom they regard as inferior and subordinate; both exhibit freedom of African American voice; both share parallels in subject matter--psychological trauma, the oppression and dehumanization of slaves, and suicides of principal African American slave characters. Most significantly, both reflect the limitations experienced by black writers working within the restrictive space of the Euro-American literary conventions of melodrama (Sejour) and local color (Chesnutt) for the purpose of appealing to a largely white reading audience. To execute this, Sejour and Chesnutt employ racial tinting of the embedded narrators and of the protagonists of the stories they recount. Both black writers assume the guises of white auditors of the embedded stories of their narrators, Antoine and Julius, a slave and a former slave. Adopting this stance and approach partly negates and compromises the effect of what the black narrators say as well as how they choose to present their narratives; in other words, it restricts the range and credibility of their principal narrative voices through melodrama (Sejour) and local color (Chesnutt), respectively. Moreover, "The Mulatto" and "Dave's Neckliss" connect in yet another way. According to Jon Smith, "the literature, cultures, and identity politics of the U.S. South are seen as important ... because they share several traits with those of the global South--a history ... of colonial plantations, race slavery ... [and] vibrant African cultural survival" (125). In noting some of the general similarities among the geographical areas known as "Plantation America," George B. Handley generally observes, "the historical patterns that characterize the U.S. South also connect to a larger region of the Americas ... creat[ing] a region of perplexing but compelling commonality among Caribbean nations, the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America, Brazil, and the U. …

For all their associations with Enlightenment rationality and the privileging of realism and order over Romantic chaos, Walter Scott’s Waverley novels regularly feature a certain irrational, chaotic character type—one whose bizarre behavior and “twilight rationality” seem at odds with the Author of Waverley’s calm, authoritative voice. Criticism has long found in some of these characters (such as Guy Mannering’s Meg Merrilies, The Heart of Midlothian’s Madge Wildfire, and The Antiquary’s Edie Ochiltree) a meaningful link between the genteel young man of middling loyalties at the center of Scott’s novels— the “wavering” hero described by Georg Lukacs—and the peoples, customs and folk cultures they encounter in their journeys. Their surprising wildness is nevertheless authentic, critics argue; they are particularly vivid samplings of local color. As such these marginal characters serve to introduce the staid English observer to the seemingly strange, typically backwards Scots culture, history, and landscapes that Scott is either celebrating or appropriating, depending on whom one asks. 1 Like the sturdy peasants, the Mucklebackits and Fairservices of Scott, these “elementals” (as Walter Allen called them in The English Novel) are steeped in genuine Scottishness (132-33). Unlike them, their excessive strangeness and borderline lunacy prompt edgy and unpredictable behavior, which in turn immerses the protagonist and reader in traditional Scottish folk culture and dialect, even if Scott himself has largely adapted the originals and invented most of the tradition. This linking of the Elementals with local agrarian culture and custom coincides with Lukacs’ appreciation of Scott’s delineation of historical processes “from the bottom,” anticipates James Reed’s claims for “locality”

The interrogation of the category of race in Kate Chopin’s fiction represents an essential dimension of regional aesthetics, and it offers an alternative view to previous interpretations that focus primarily on feminist themes. This article examines the role of Louisiana as a specific region in the construction of the tragic mulatta stereotype in the fiction of Kate Chopin, primarily in her stories “Desiree’s Baby” and “La Belle Zoraide,” and by analogy in her most successful novel The Awakening. I propose to extricate Chopin’s work from the virgin/ whore dichotomy so often applied to white and non- white characters respectively. 1 From a new perspective, an illumination of the portrayals of the tragic mulatta figure in Chopin’s texts invites a reconsideration of the stereotype of the tragic mulatta that typically oscillates between evocations of the exotic and the sentimental. Attempting to reclaim the category of race in regionalist fic tion by examining the tragic mulatta stereotype in the selected texts, I see parallels between this pervasive image of southern local color fiction and the post- colonial paradigm, i.e. the dichotomy of the colonizer versus the colonized as it is suggested by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks as well as the notion of stereo type as a form of normalizing, yet contradictory, judgment in Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. From this perspective, the trope of the tragic mulatta appropriated by Chopin in her fiction represents an essential point of concurrence of the issues of gender, race, and region, and it points to the underlying racial anxiety mani fested by the existence of ambivalent feelings of fear and desire toward

Most scholars of American literature consider the works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) as falling in either or both of the two following literary traditions: regional local color realism and proto-feminist writings. Among her most noteworthy middle-twentieth-century critics are Edward Foster and Perry Westbrook, who situate her solidly in the local color regionalist convention. Freeman's many later-twentieth-century scholars, such as Marjorie Pryse, Mary R. Reichardt, and Leah Blatt Glasser, spurred by the growing feminist movement in literature and theory, later recontextualized Freeman in the proto-feminist camp of nineteenth-century women writers while otherwise staying the course that Foster and Westbrook set forth. If Freeman could see how her legacy has unfolded, surely she would be disappointed not to be considered among the great American writers. She was an immensely popular and prolific author in the United States and the United Kingdom, publishing in the many Harper magazines and penning twenty-two volumes of short stories and fourteen novels, among other writings (Kendrick 4). On more than one occasion she has been considered on a par with the likes of Hawthorne and Twain. However, it appears that if Freeman is to gain more repute in literary studies, scholars must continue to find new niches for her work. Again she must be recontextualized. Fortunately for her enduring legacy, her work is prevalent with fairy and folk themes that, to date, scholars have largely failed to recognize, lending yet another venue from which her vast literary talent and merit may be examined and revealing new and important insights into her opus. Freeman has left clues to her fairy and folk influence for those with a quick eye. Accounts from friends and family say she was quick to read fairy stories throughout her life (Foster 15, 43n195). Her late short story "The Prism" (1901) is particularly telling: Diantha Fielding, a girl of twelve, lies in an open field looking at "dancing colors" through a teardrop prism from a period lamp. In the prism, Diantha sees dancing fairies. Years later, Robert Black takes Diantha into the woods and asks her to marry him. She accepts and shares the secret of her prism: "What do you see, Robert," she asks (63), but he sees only myriad colors and responds, "what else should I see?" She continues, "You have read-about fairies-and such things. . . . Ever since I was a child, I have seen, or thought so . . . beautiful little people moving and dancing in the broken light across the fields" (64). Robert is appalled, and Diantha, rejected, buries the prism. "It's all right, little girl . . . but don't let such fancies dwell in your brain. This is a plain, common world, and it won't do," Robert consoles (65). Diantha never speaks of fairies again and serves faithfully as Robert's wife from then on. Like Diantha, Freeman too seems stuck in the authoritative whims of scholars who have appropriated her for their own limited interpretations, but the fairy-tale discourse in her work is one of Freeman's own making, and it ought to be recognized as one that helps her step out of her critics' staid preconceptions of her work. An unearthing of Freeman's prism visions reveals more than colors plain and common. Freeman's use of fantastical imagery and fairy-tale elements in her children's poetry and prose illustrates that early in her career she certainly did not always seek realism as a hallmark of her work. Karl J. Terryberry says that many of Freeman's children's stories "resemble the folk or fairy tales that were written by the Brothers Grimm or Perrault. . . . Usually, these stories of fantasy are set in fictional lands that are ruled by good kings and queens who help young girls find husbands who are of royal descent" (21). Although they have failed to garner the same scrutiny in terms of folk and fairy genres. Freeman's adult works continue to draw from the copious fairy-tale themes that she so often employed in her children's canon. …

Did you know that the South and for all I know the entire USA is full of demonic women who, driven by as yet unnamed furies, are desperately restoring and preserving places, buildings? --Walker Percy, Lancelot, 103 No one, not even Faulkner, wrote more about historic preservation in the South than Walker Percy, a fact that may surprise those more familiar with his reputation as the Sartre of the Sun Belt. If Percy is associated with the South at all it is usually with that new-and-improved South of "superdomes, condos, and high-rises"--a South that Faulkner would have scarcely even considered to be southern. Unlike Faulkner, Percy was no "pious descendant of time"; (1) raised in a "new house on a new golf course" in suburban Birmingham, Percy came of age in a South that, on the surface at least, wasn't all that southern anymore, a South where place was no longer destiny, nor sense of place the virtue that it once was (Signposts 213). Where Faulkner invoked the genius loci, Percy fled from it, imagining that "genie soul of place" perched on his shoulder "like a buzzard" (The Moviegoer 160). Little wonder then that this most place-haunted of southern writers should have turned a skeptical eye towards preservation. The sacred "covenant with memory and history" so central to the preservationist's creed is precisely the sort of thing that Percy's existential fictions repeatedly challenge (Signposts 209). Where Faulkner took for granted that there was a past worth preserving, Percy questioned just what it was that the South was trying to preserve. In the aftermath of the Bulldozer Revolution, much of the South's architectural heritage had been lost; of the few remaining icons still left standing, none could say for sure just what it was that they stood for, especially now when the South seemed but a parody of its former self, more a creation of the popular imagination and the tourist trade than a distinct identifiable entity. Percy himself was particularly adept at surveying those indeterminate zones in the South where the line between what was real and what appeared to be real had grown ever more indistinct. For one so preoccupied with definitions of reality and authenticity, the world of historic preservation, with its "authentic replicas" and elaborate facsimiles, proved a fertile ground indeed. One comes away from Percy's novels wondering just how much of historic preservation is historic after all, and how much marketing and myth. Needless to say, what Percy had to say about preservation was often less than flattering. Preservationists are a running joke throughout Percy's novels, most of them mere caricatures and thinly drawn types, "would-be Scarletts" drunk on moonlight and magnolia, all "pantalooned and harlequined" but with none of the piety--or pedigree--of their predecessors (Signposts 185; Lancelot 72.). In The Moviegoer, it's Binx Bolling's Aunt Edna, the druggist's daughter from upstate New York, who transforms the Bollings' humble old homeplace into a "showplace" in "the best Natchez style--adding a covered walk to the outkitchen, serving mint juleps where the Bollings had never drunk anything but toddies, and even dressing up poor old Shad in a Seagram's butler suit and putting him out on the highway with a dinner bell" (140). (2) In Lancelot, it's Margot Lamar, the west Texas debutante turned "assured mistress" of Belle Isle and president of the Landmark Preservation Society. Despite extensive restoration, Margot remains just another Calamity Jane in a hoopskirt, a "callow coltish skittish-mustang Texas girl" who can still "cut loose and swear like an oilfield roughneck" (79, 69). Such portrayals are perhaps the closest Percy ever came to writing local color, but they represent a radical departure from the conventional image of the preservationist as a blue-haired blue-blood standing sentinel before the shrines of the Old South. In Percy's South, those pious dames of old are nowhere to be seen, their ranks having long since been overrun by an upstart class of self-possessed poseurs motivated less by a sense of place than a sense of entitlement, compensation perhaps for not having been "to the manor born. …

I grew up in the mountains of Colorado, which explains why I have long had a particular fondness for books set in my native state. As a boy, I especially liked Ralph Moody's Little Britches: Father and I Were Ranchers (1950), but now my favorite children's book set in Colorado is Helen Hunt Jackson's Nelly's Silver Mine: A Story of Colorado Life (1878). Although I read books about Colorado during my childhood, it was not until I was an adult that I first read this largely forgotten novel. I discovered Nelly's Silver Mine while conducting the preliminary research for Wellsprings of Imagination: The Homes of Children's Authors (1992). Part of my research involved identifying authors' homes that are now open to the public. I came across a reference to Jackson's partially preserved home in Colorado Springs. I was surprised to learn that Jackson had lived in Colorado, since I had always associated her with southern California, the setting of her best-known novel Ramona (1884). I decided to see if she had written any children's books set in Colorado. I looked her up in Glenn Estes's American Writers for Children Before 1900 and found an informative entry on her written by Taimi M. Ranta. I learned about the existence of Nelly's Silver Mine: A Story of Colorado Life. I tracked down a copy and have been extolling the book's virtues ever since. Although Jackson is not often classified as a local color writer, Nelly's Silver Mine provides ample evidence that she had a gift for capturing the details associated with a particular region. Her book contains vivid descriptions of Colorado's mountains, canyons, and rock formations, as well as its distinctive plants and animals. As a children's novel, Nelly's Silver Mine is worth reading for several reasons. Not only is it one of the first realistic children's books to be set in the West, it also features a

In Kate Chopin's first two critical essays, both written in 1894, the same year her first collection of short fiction, Bayou Folk, was published, the St. Louis-born walter--who was best known for her Louisiana fictions--demonstrates the ambivalence with which many nineteenth-century American authors approached terms like regionalism and local color. The essays are brief but incisive accounts of the strengths and weaknesses of regional writing and offer a quick glance at the literary conflicts at the end of the century. The first reports on the Western Association of Writers, a mostly Indiana group that Chopin chides for "clinging to past and conventional standards, [for] an almost Creolean sensitiveness to criticism and a singular ignorance of, or disregard for, the value of the highest art forms."(1) The group's provincialism, Chopin suggests, prevents it from realizing that "there is a very, very big world lying not wholly in northern Indiana." But to ensure that her criticism of local writing here is not itself read provincially, Chopin continues to describe the world good fiction must attempt to configure: "nor does it lie at the antipodes, either. It is human existence in its subtle, complex, true meaning, stripped of the veil with which ethical and conventional standards have draped it" (691). The second is a more measured piece, a mixed review of Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland's collection of essays championing the use of regional and local color elements in the service of a literary realism. By Chopin's estimation, when Garland advocates breaking free of "the hold of conventionalism," he ends up undervaluing "the importance of the past in art and exaggerates the significance of the present," especially as the present makes itself visible through the meticulous detailing of local life. Though she herself was a writer of regional fiction that was enthusiastically promoted for its artistic and faithful rendering of local life, Chopin here warns that "social problems, social environments, local color and the rest of it are not of themselves motives to insure the survival of a writer who employs them" (693). Chopin's curious aversion to the efforts of her fellow regional writers in these essays seems to come from a suspicion of any ethical motive or naturalist principle and favor a strict formalism or aestheticism. The critiques also show Chopin to be reluctant to throw in with any aesthetic ideology that blindly attacks the powers that support it or the artistic forms that enable it. Thus she characterizes the Western Association's eschewing of high art as naive and childish, and she takes Garland to task for his impolitic criticism of the East as a tyrannous literary center. "There can no good come of abusing Boston and New York," Chopin cautions: "On the contrary, as `literary centers' they have rendered incalculable service ... by bringing to light whatever ... has been produced of force and originality in the West and South since the war" (694). Such a position is coincidentally (and perhaps ironically) in step with much of the early twentieth-century literary criticism of regional fiction that kept Chopin an admired but minor figure until the rediscovery of her second novel, The Awakening. At first glance, much of Chopin's own fiction seems to discount her critique of Garland's "veritism" and of regional writing in general, but a closer inspection, particularly of the short fiction, tells a different story. Chopin delivers her criticism with authority and conviction, with the authenticity of one who speaks from within a region and tradition, suggesting not that Chopin is simply inconsistent in her criticism and practice, but rather that Chopin's understanding of regional writing includes a sophisticated and indeed implicitly ethical knowledge of the dangers inherent in claiming to offer an authentic or enduring relation of another person or community. Published six months before her review of Garland's manifesto, Chopin's Bayou Folk contains two stories that explicitly challenge the impulse of local color to provide an authentic vision of a region. …

Hamlin Garland has always posed something of a problem for literary critics; even those who find his work historically important seem to hold it in contempt. Prolific, passionate, sometimes absurdly polemical, Garland's writing has always occupied an uneasy place in the canon of American literature. Best known now for his early collection of regional stories Main-Travelled Roads (1891) as well as for the reformist sympathies those stories seemed to embody, Garland's later literary output consisted almost entirely of popular romances, heart-warming narratives of his frontier childhood, and popular western potboilers. Garland's decline from the flinty realism of his early work into the domain of the popular has long puzzled critics, prompting some to interpret recursively Main-Travelled Roads and his collected essays, Crumbling Idols (1894), as holding the prophetic seeds of his later fall from serious literature.(1) Bill Brown has recently attempted to reinterpret Garland's seeming defection from radical populist causes (and the ongoing critical disparagement that accompanied it) by returning to Garland's early attitudes toward popular culture on the one hand, and the culture of the people on the other. Brown argues that Garland's construction and valuation of that most charged and fantastical category, "the people," stands at a crossroads between populism's fetishization of the people (embodied in Garland's early regional work) and popular culture's anesthetization of them (exemplified by his later work). Whether or not critics follow the invitation to place Garland at the center of current debates in cultural studies, it seems clear that part of Garland's significance is that his career announces some of the terms of debates about the status of local authorship and experience, and national identity and value, in the late nineteenth century.(2) Just as Garland's literary output might be used to examine the buried assumptions about how popular and populist fictions both inform and thwart one another, it can also be used to uncover some of the components that inform ideas about the value regional identity and authorship take in local color fiction--the genre in which his earliest fiction self-consciously participated and that his early critical essays championed. Even Garland's champions note that his fiction has been described as rough, workmanlike, without subtlety or nuance. But even if we agree with such judgments of the formal infelicities of his writing, we might also wish to reevaluate the use of the category of the aesthetic: what does stylistic infelicity mean or do? If Garland's work is laborious or workmanlike, it is perhaps because the labor of representation in his texts is entangled in potentially irreconcilable political and aesthetic economies. Examining the conjuncture of politics and aesthetics in Garland's work may not rescue his critical reputation, but using him as a case study will allow us to track the hidden histories of the production of local identity, regional culture, and regional authorship that the "best" and most successful regional writing has helped to conceal. While it is not my intention to rehearse all of the criticism of late nineteenth-century regional writing, some of the most salient features of the genre will help to contextualize Garland's work.(3) Regional fiction, which had its heyday in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, appeared primarily in elite periodicals, like the Atlantic Monthly, that catered to the upper middle classes. Broadly, regional stories formally privilege local customs, the symbolic meaning of "place" and geography, and include copious examples of local dialect. All of these formal features were in the service of adding verisimilitude to the depiction of the local culture under examination. Regional fiction tended to present its locales as outside of the exigencies of capitalism, a strategy that was reinforced by its careful presentation of the rural concerns of its local color characters. …

It is often difficult to convince students who are reading Charles Chesnutt's dialect tales for the first time that his brief writing career, from about 1887 to 1905, coincided with the "nadir" of American race relations.(1) Chesnutt insisted in 1903 that "the rights of the Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time during the thirty-five years of their freedom, and the race prejudice more intense and uncompromising," a comment borne out by the period's record number of lynchings and systematic denial of civil and political rights to blacks.(2) Yet Uncle Julius appears to be doing pretty well, students are likely to point out, and his narrative forays into the antebellum past function very effectively to secure the former slave's post-war dotage. Although Chesnutt elsewhere plays the role of social critic with brutal directness, the conjure tales betray little anxiety over the rapid deterioration of African-American rights after Reconstruction, and they include virtually no evidence of a "more intense and uncompromising" racial prejudice in Julius's fictional Patesville, North Carolina. It is tempting to respond to this characterization of the dialect tales by alluding to Chesnutt's well-documented frustration with the conventions of local color Southern fiction, conventions he successfully abandoned in more strident and polemically charged non-dialect stories and novels, including "The Sheriff's Children," "The Web of Circumstance," and The Marrow of Tradition. Yet such an apologetic characterization of the politically coy dialect tales overlooks their complicated engagement with contemporary issues, specifically issues related to the abridgment of the Fifteenth Amendment and the restriction of African-American participation in post-Reconstruction Southern cultural life generally. The form of this engagement is so elusive because social critique in the dialect tales operates in three quite different historical registers at once. Julius is significantly insulated from the demise of race relations at the end of the nineteenth century, because he occupies what is for Chesnutt a crucial moment of historical transition, immediately after Reconstruction and just before the retrenchment of white racist sentiment in the South. Chesnutt dwells on this uncertain moment not as a nostalgic retreat from the social realities of the present, but because in Julius's world the nature and extent of black participation in Southern cultural and political life remain open questions--questions Chesnutt was very much interested in reopening with readers in the degenerating racial climate of the 1880s and 1890s. Julius's tales of antebellum suffering under slavery thus resonate with significance for his own era, in which the stories function like a form of post-war currency, and they also look forward to an America Julius can hardly imagine. A similar pattern of social critique occurs in Paul Laurence Dunbar's "An Ante-Bellum Sermon," in which a slave preacher elaborates on the story of Moses as a thinly veiled incitement to rebellion among the members of his congregation. The analogy between Egyptian and American slavery made in the poem's final and most interesting stanza suddenly points to a third term, citizenship: An' we'll shout ouah halleluyahs, On dat mighty reck'nin' day, When we' se reco' nized ez citiz'-- Huh uh! Chillun, let us pray!(3) Dunbar's incomplete reference to black "citizens," the word so aptly foreshortened to suggest the precariousness of African-American citizenship in his own time, thrusts the biblical legend and its antebellum subtext into the charged racial discourse of the 1890s, where not freedom but franchise is at stake. Chesnutt is rarely so obvious about the direction of his satire, but the dialect tales launch a similar brand of social critique that splinters in several directions at once. Julius's tales of antebellum slavery comment obliquely, but persistently, on both the scene of their performance and the scene of their composition. …

Campbell, Donna. "Edith Wharton and the 'Authoresses': The Critique of Local Color in Wharton's Early Fiction." Studies in American Fiction 22 (Fall 1994): 169-183.

Holm, Helge Vidar. Moeurs de province: Essai d'analyse bakhtinienne de Madame Bovary. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. 266. ISBN: 978-3-0343-0453-5 Helge Vidar Holm's new study on Moeurs de province, the subtitle of what is likely to be considered Gustave Flaubert's best-known novel, Madame Bovary, is a refreshing addition to critical debate in the field of Flaubert Studies. Referencing numerous editions of the novel, Holm demonstrates that even though Flaubert insisted on using a subtitle for his work (he added it to the publisher's copy in his own hand), later editions of the novel continued mysteriously to omit it. Further, Holm affirms this absence in an informative section at the end of the text in which he reproduces the covers of several editions of Flaubert's novel, with and without the subtitle. To this end, it turns out that "Moeurs de Province" is much more than a Balzacien allusion to the local color of rural life, or an attempt to highlight the juxtaposition between Emma's desire to be a "grande dame" and her social station as wife of a poor country doctor. For Holm, this subtitle has a direct correlation with the language of the provinces and its impact on the novel. Drawing from Claude Duchet's observations on the signification of the subtitle in two different articles ("Discours social et texte italique dans Madame Bovary" in Langages de Flaubert (1976) and "Etranges moeurs de province" in Le magazine litteraire (2006)), Holm adds his own interpretive twist to the importance of Flaubert's choice of subtitle by approaching it through the work of Mikhail Bakhtine. Specifically, Holm utilizes Bakhtine's notion of dialogisme as a critical lens that highlights the metatextual dialog between Madame Bovary and Moeurs de Province, a unique perspective discernible from the very title of Holm's text that promotes for the first time the subtitle to a position similar to that of the title of the novel itself. For Holm, this change is paramount to his argument on the importance of the subtitle, which describes, as he states: "[...] l'importance cruciale des moeurs langagieres sur lesquelles le romancier normand fonde sa critique de la societe de l'epoque" (3). In this case, it is not just Emma's penchant for transposing the fictive onto the real that impedes her progress in society, but also the language she uses that is an integral part of her character, as well as of the novel itself. Dividing his study into three distinct parts: "Le texte dialogique," "Les dimensions axiologique et temporelle," and "Le destinataire," Holm guides his readers logically into what would otherwise present a labyrinth of nebulous critical perspectives from notable scholars, past and present, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Ricceur, Ferdinand de Saussure, Tzvetan Todorov, and many others. …

In 1877, Blanche Willis Howard moved from what she described as the "close confinement" of her hometown of Bangor, Maine, to Stuttgart, Germany, where she had the "absolute freedom" to pursue a life as a writer (MWWC, to E. H. Howard, undated fragment). In a writing career that spanned twenty-five years, twenty-three of them spent in Germany, Howard published nine novels, a travelogue, and numerous short stories, poems, and translations. For several decades her works were popular and eagerly awaited by her publishers and the reading public, even if today they are not well known. She published in children's magazines and adult periodicals in America, England, and Germany, and the full extent of what she published is still to be discovered. The record that has come together so far reveals her to have been a writer who resisted the literary conventions that demanded women focus on local color and regional writing. In many of her novels, women purposely wander away from their homes and cultures to seek more meaningful lives. Howard herself wandered, not in search of adventure, but to live an expatriate life that afforded her the broad education, cultural interactions, and seclusion and privacy she believed necessary for her writing. She was, in the opinion of one writer, "with the single exception of Mr. Henry James, the only American novelist who found a long exile and a firm hold upon the American public at all compatible" (Dunbar 155). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Howard wanted to be recognized as a serious writer, but she did not welcome publicity about her personal life. In one of her few interviews, which appeared in 1898, the year she died in Munich, Germany, Howard told journalist Olivia Howard Dunbar that she valued living "remotely in Europe" (155).' The interviewer reported that the "roar of the Atlantic was quite loud enough to dull the echo of public opinion long before it reached quiet Germany, and appreciation must have come to her quite distilled, in the form of letters or, more or less belated, through the press" (162). In Germany, she continued, Howard had "found at all times much the greatest stimulus in an atmosphere not freighted with prejudices and ready-made opinions of many 'literary centres'" (163). Early in her career, Howard laughed privately about people who speculated that the characters and events in her books were "real." When a critic stated that Leigh, the protagonist of her first novel, One Summer, was actually the author, Howard countered, remarking in a letter to her sister, Marion Howard Smith, "Leigh was about as much like me as the cat" (Bowdoin, 23 April 1880). She put such speculators into a group she called "commercial critics" and told her sister that they knew nothing "whatever of my life and its motives" (Bowdoin, 9 December 1883). Howard issued her strongest statement about critics who intruded into her personal life in 1892, just after Houghton Mifflin published a new edition of the still popular One Summer, with illustrations by Augustus Hoppin, and just as her new book, a collaboration with the British writer William Sharp, A Fellow and His Wife, was about to appear. According to a New York World reporter, Howard had written One Summer after an unrequited romantic adventure with an unnamed man left her despondent and forced her to flee to Europe. To this tale, Howard reacted with anger in an unpublished response titled "American Alligator." The "allegation is false," she wrote, calling such gossip about her life "a kind of libel." Howard argued that only "the author" of a text "can understand how those mysterious beings, his own creations, gradually assume shape, and it would perhaps be well for the general public to manifest less credulity toward flying reports about them." She put the blame not on the public but on the critics, writing, "I personally consider it unmanly and ungenerous, as well as a confession of lamentable poverty of intellect, to print long dull falsehoods about a woman merely because she has written a very few quiet books. …