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Rural Fictions, Urban Realities - A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (Paperback)
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Rural Fictions, Urban Realities - A Geography of Gilded Age American Literature (Paperback)
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The diminishment of rural life at the hands of urbanization, for
many, defines the years between the end of the Civil War and the
dawn of the twentieth century in the U.S. Traditional literary
histories find this transformation clearly demarcated between rural
tales-stories set in the countryside, marked by attention to
regional dialect and close-knit communities-and grittier novels and
short stories that reflected the harsh realities of America's
growing cities. Challenging this conventional division, Mark Storey
proffers a capacious, trans-regional version of rural fiction that
contains and coexists with urban-industrial modernity. To remap
literary representations of the rural, Storey pinpoints four key
aspects of everyday life that recur with surprising frequency in
late nineteenth-century fiction: train journeys, travelling
circuses, country doctors, and lynch mobs. Fiction by figures such
as Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, and William Dean Howells use
railroads and roving carnivals to signify the deeper incursions of
urban capitalism into the American countryside. A similar, somewhat
disruptive migration of the urban into the rural occurs with the
arrival of modern medicine, as viewed in depictions of the country
doctor in novels like Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor and
Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. This discussion
gives way to a far darker interaction between the urban and the
rural, with the intricate relationship of vigilante justice to an
emerging modernity used to frame readings of rural lynchings in
works by writers like Bret Harte, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, and Owen Wister. The four arenas-transport, entertainment,
medicine, and the law-used to organize the study come together in a
coda devoted to utopian fiction, which demonstrates one of the more
imaginative methods used to express the social and literary
anxieties around the changing nature of urban and rural space at
the end of the nineteenth century. Mining a rich variety of long
neglected novels and short stories, Rural Fictions, Urban Realities
provides a new literary geography of Gilded Age America, and in the
process, contributes to our understanding of how we represent and
register the cultural complexities of modernization.
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