Local Color Fiction

Local Color Fiction & WomenWriters

Local color fiction is the term used to designate a literary movement that dominated in America between 1870 and the end of the century. These stories, whichbelong to the realistic movement and became the dominant form of short story writing in the country, emphasize setting and show detailed descriptions of landscapes, customs and dialect.
Regionalismwas a reaction against the economic impact of industrialization and modernization after the civil war. The writers of this period produce a literature that celebrated the unique language, rituals andother cultural traits of their part of the country. This kind of fiction also has a kind of nostalgic function and tries to represent the small details which show how time has gone by.
These aresome of the main characteristics of this kind of literature: the settings tend to emphasize on nature and remote places, the characters are represented as stereotypes, the narrator acts like a mediatorbetween the rural folk of the tale and the urban audience to whom the tale is directed, it seems like in local color stories “nothing happens” and the typical theme is the conflict between urban andrural way of life.
This literature use dialects to make the story more credible.
The most important authors in this period were, in most of the cases, female authors such as Harriet Beecher Stoweor Sarah Orne Jewett in New England, Hamlin Garland in the Midwest or Thomas Nelson Page in the South.
There was a great growth in female writing in this period and the novels they produced wereknown as sentimental novels, which were didactic in form, artless in style, sincere in tone, melodramatic in plotting and addressed to a female readership. But this new female creativity was considereda contradiction since creativity seemed to be incompatible with women’s roles. However, little by little, a new body of American women’s literature emerged with the name of female Bildungsroman.