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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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