Region, narration and national authority: Genre and resistance in turn-of-the-century Southern Regionalism

This dissertation reexamines the way we define Regionalism as a literary form and especially considers what this definition tells us about the connection between canon building and nation building in the nineteenth century United States. My argument suggests a revised definition for the genre that de-emphasizes the role of place while it underscores the ideological characteristics that, though often ignored, are the most important consideration in the process of defining regional literatures. I focus on Regionalism from the South because the post-bellum South's unique position in terms of regional and national identity has made it emblematic of region and regionalization in America. As the one section to revolt against inclusion within American national identity, the South has played a consistent role in American history---the domestic but exotic body against which the national self defined its own character. A study of Southern Regionalism reveals a complex balance between assimilation and alienation central to the mechanism of American literary regionalism.;The heart of this dissertation lies in a three-part argument. First, I propose that our traditional reading of Regionalism as an autochthonous literature that somehow reflects the natural difference that results from the text's relationship to the place of its conception is founded on anachronistic ideas of place and identity. Second, I argue that Regionalism's most important function is not the bridge it builds between Romance and Realism, but rather its tendency to undermine the structures of social domination that suggested the notion of a singular and exclusive American national identity defining and defined by a specific literary ideal. Third, I illustrate these aspects of the genre by reading three Southern regionalists with a focus on their tendency to frustrate structures of authority. Beginning with a brief discussion of the role that Southwestern Humor played in establishing a literature that employed the idea of regional difference to consider systems of social organization within American culture, I connect the antebellum work of authors such as George Washington Harris and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet with post bellum regionalists Mary Murfree, Thomas Nelson Page, and Charles Chesnutt. What links these authors is not a self-serving sense of the South as either tragically romantic or hopelessly backwards, but their adherence to consistently similar techniques of undermining the sense of cosmopolitan authority and superiority at the heart of regional difference in nineteenth-century America. De-prioritizing the role of place and focusing instead on the literary and aesthetic strategies that unite these works within a larger aesthetic tradition, I attempt to approach these texts from a position that specifically avoids the old classifications and their persistence in viewing (especially Southern) Regionalism as a sort of childish fantasy of a fictionalized past.;In the first chapter, I introduce the critical tradition surrounding Regionalism in America. I review the major critical responses to the form beginning with William Dean Howells encouraging reviews in The Atlantic and finishing with scholarship from critics such as Scott Romine and Barbara Ewell. In the second chapter, I concentrate on Mary Murfree's short story collection, In the Tennessee Mountains, and her first novel, The Prophet of the Great Smokey Mountains, focusing on the way Murfree's brand of regionalism seems to address the social regionalization of women and their subsequent isolation from the structures of power and authority. In chapter three, I read Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia and Red Rock and argue that these texts misperform the conventions of the Reconciliation Romance specifically in order to get at a more complex understanding of the issues surrounding Reconstruction. In the fourth chapter, I argue that Charles Chesnutt does something very similar in The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories. Like Murfree and Page, Chesnutt uses the regional form in order to take advantage of its unique capacity for layering perspectives, and in doing so, works to explode the simple binary through which America has defined race for at least the last two centuries. My concluding chapter uses these readings of Murfree, Page, and Chesnutt to assemble a tradition of Southern regionalism not based on the simple recurrence of pat genre models or superficial character types, but one organized around the way these texts interact and respond to the social, economic and politic traditions these models and types represent.