Regionalism Research Paper

America during this period from 1865-1914 was transitioning from predominantly agrarian, rural societies to industrial and urban. The United States, slightly emerging from a damaging Civil War, was soon to realize what the transcontinental railroad would offer this country. This opened the interior land of the United States for settlement, which brought prospectors, new innovations, and a burst of industrialization. Rapid transcontinental settlement and changing urban industrial conditions introduced new themes, new forms, new subjects, new characters, new regions, and new authors to the literary marketplace in the half century following the Civil War. American writers of this period increasingly adopted the form of realism in their fiction. Most realist fiction focused on the observable surfaces
The local color writers’ intent was to try to capture distinct language, geographical settings, and the perspectives of the time period before industrialization. According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (Hart & Leininger, 2004). These fiction writers generated interests in different regions of the country. In the West, Mark Twain relied on nostalgia and romanticized on frontiersman, whereas in the South, Kate Chopin’s hierarchies of southern society set the theme, in New England, Sarah Orne Jewett, wanted readers to adjust themselves to women’s thoughts and reconsider society’s favoring of men, and Mary Wilkins Freeman, also of New England, texts incorporate the New England dialects and traits, elements of the area’s Puritan roots, and descriptions of life in rural and sometimes impoverished New