American Literary Regionalism

American Literary Regionalism, also called local color writing, was a mode of American fiction that flourished from the 1860s through the early twentieth century, focusing closely on the distinctive customs, dialect, landscape and social texture of a particular American region rather than a generalized or urban national setting. Prominent practitioners worked across the country's regions: Bret Harte and Mark Twain in the American West and Mississippi River valley, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in rural New England, Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable in Louisiana Creole culture, and Charles W. Chesnutt writing from and about the African American South. Regionalist fiction generally combined close ethnographic attention to a locality's speech and manners with a wistful or elegiac sense that older, more distinctive regional ways of life were disappearing under the pressure of national industrialization and homogenization, and the mode is understood as a bridge between the earlier local-color sketch and the fuller psychological and social Realism that followed it in American letters.