Often, Modernism is perceived as a transnational, cosmopolitan literary movement. While that is true, it’s interesting to examine Modernity not on a continental scale, but through the more marginal perspectives: work that doesn’t seek to engage with the urban center, but focuses on one particular region. Examining the tensions between class, race, or between the rural and the urban lends a specific understanding of how different societies were reacting to Modernity, resulting in a more nuanced view of the Modern period as a whole.
Explanation:
Regional literature refers to fiction or poetry that seeks to embody and convey the landscapes, culture and dialectic features that characterize a particular region. In America, examples of common regions include the South, the Midwest or the Southwest. Regionalism as an artistic movement is thought to have reached its peak, both in the visual and literary arts, following World War I. However, traces of Regionalism are present throughout the Modernist period, far prior to 20’s. Artists participating in the movement viewed the region as a “‘means toward a richer, freer, and more humane way of life,’ represented by the diverse cultures maintained by groups of individuals removed from the modern metropolitan centers” (University of Texas). Ultimately, Regionalists hoped to establish a “utopian balance among small cities, a revitalized rural economy, and rich wilderness areas” (University of Texas). Regionalism exists in many capacities in Modern poetry. However, it is most apparently a pointed response against the emerging urban, mass-culture of the time, as well as a method of anchorage in the chaotic and fragmented Modern world.
Regional literature during the Modern period is directly correlated to the continuing emergence of mass-culture. Modern Regionalists were consciously revolting “against the over centralization of cultural production in New York and Hollywood” (Dorman 8). On a more general level, Regionalists sought to pose the local as a virtuous alternative to “an invading metropolitan flood spewing outward from the cities, especially the industrial cities of the Northeast” (Dorman 8). A re-focusing on regional traditions looked back to what Modern urban-industrial America was erasing, such as a sense of roots, local traditions and community, qualities perceived necessary to lead towards a more utopian society. Regionalist artists believed globalization and standardization to be creating to a dangerously homogenous culture, and it was thought that “fidelity to ‘local customs’ and an assertion of the ‘value of ordinary rural lives’” were the last defense of cultural individuality (Storey 197). However, as these artists examined their locales in depth, they did not encounter havens of utopian antiquity. Rather, a picture emerged “not of folk virtues and decentralized symbiotic communities, but of widespread poverty, class animosities, environmental desolation, and racial oppression” (Dorman 8). For example, Jean Toomer’s very southern Cane engages with the rural beauty of Georgia, but also depicts the grueling labor conditions and inequalities experienced by Southern blacks. Carl Sandberg’s Chicago Poems portray heated class tensions, even as they celebrate the progress of the Midwest. In this sense, regional poetry’s end result was less an escape from the problems of the center, and more a foray into the unique issues of one locale.
