Regionalism in American modernism

Abstract

Any attempt to link regionalism to American modernism may seem, at first blush, a perverse enterprise. After all, definitions of modernism tend to cast it as nearly the antithesis of regionalism. If regionalist fiction between the 1890s and 1910s typically focused on matters of domesticity in rural localities, modernism was an international movement, encompassing the fine arts as well as literature. In so many of its manifestations, from Cubism in painting to atonality in music and stream-of-conscious narration in fiction, modernism bespeaks a self-conscious difficulty intended to shock the middle class out of its complacency and to create the possibility of fresh perception. The radical formal experiments of modernism often are accompanied by an equally radical politics, from Ezra Pound's open embracing of fascism to the many American authors who were drawn to Communism in the 1930s. Not surprisingly then, modernism is typically associated with urban centers, places where the arts flourish; Vienna, Paris, London, and New York more immediately come to mind when thinking of cutting edge aesthetic and political thought than, say, Red Cloud, Nebraska; Richmond, Virginia; or even Oxford, Mississippi. The years this volume covers (1890–1939) also create problems for seeking the ground of regionalism and modernism. In an American context, modernism is typically thought to “happen” between World Wars I and II, as writers respond to T. S. Eliot’s diagnosis of the spiritual wasteland of modernity, a world in which all the institutions (the Church, the State, the University) that previously had sustained value seemed for many intellectuals to have failed. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner all specifically engaged The Waste Land so that, even when critical of Eliot, they nevertheless signaled their membership in the club of international modernism. No one would call Eliot (born in St. Louis, Missouri) a Midwestern writer. Nor, for that matter, would Midwestern literature typically claim Hemingway or Fitzgerald, despite their being from, respectively, Oak Park, Illinois, and St. Paul, Minnesota.