Local Color
Nov. 15th, 2004 06:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Local Color
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Americans became curious about regional differences in manners, dress, foods, speech, and rituals. Writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and George Washington Cable produced fiction describing local customs, often focusing on rituals like weddings, holidays, and funerals, or on daily life. They recorded poverty and pain as well as quaintness and joy.
These local-color writers were influential in the development of American fiction. They stressed accuracy of detail, direct observation, and personal experience -- writers couldn't describe a Vermont barn-raising or a Tennessee wedding unless they went themselves. They recognized that ordinary people and ordinary lives could make lively fiction, that plots could be simple, that texture and atmosphere could create a story, and that regional, non-standard speech had its own poetry.
They were not revolutionaries. European and British writers were already doing the same thing. Often American local-color writers were sentimental or superficial. But they also included Mark Twain and Kate Chopin. And their influence underlies the work of William Faulkner, William Kennedy, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Toni Morrison. If the local color of the past was usually rural, the local color of the present, captured by writers like Frederick Barthelme, if often urban.
The potential for local color persists, but now it's not so much geographical (the McDonald's-is-everywhere syndrome) as cultural. America is a mosaic of hikers, bikers, sky divers, quilters, stock traders, and Avon salespeople. The American suburb deserves attention. It's perhaps difficult to perceive the cultural peculiarities in front of your own remote-controlled two-car garage, but, to other people, peanut butter on white bread is as exotic as pone.
See Accuracy, Dialect, Gathering, Onion, Realism, "Write What You Know.".
Local Color
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Americans became curious about regional differences in manners, dress, foods, speech, and rituals. Writers like Sarah Orne Jewett and George Washington Cable produced fiction describing local customs, often focusing on rituals like weddings, holidays, and funerals, or on daily life. They recorded poverty and pain as well as quaintness and joy.
These local-color writers were influential in the development of American fiction. They stressed accuracy of detail, direct observation, and personal experience -- writers couldn't describe a Vermont barn-raising or a Tennessee wedding unless they went themselves. They recognized that ordinary people and ordinary lives could make lively fiction, that plots could be simple, that texture and atmosphere could create a story, and that regional, non-standard speech had its own poetry.
They were not revolutionaries. European and British writers were already doing the same thing. Often American local-color writers were sentimental or superficial. But they also included Mark Twain and Kate Chopin. And their influence underlies the work of William Faulkner, William Kennedy, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Toni Morrison. If the local color of the past was usually rural, the local color of the present, captured by writers like Frederick Barthelme, if often urban.
The potential for local color persists, but now it's not so much geographical (the McDonald's-is-everywhere syndrome) as cultural. America is a mosaic of hikers, bikers, sky divers, quilters, stock traders, and Avon salespeople. The American suburb deserves attention. It's perhaps difficult to perceive the cultural peculiarities in front of your own remote-controlled two-car garage, but, to other people, peanut butter on white bread is as exotic as pone.
See Accuracy, Dialect, Gathering, Onion, Realism, "Write What You Know.".