The Literary Sketch and British Atlantic Regionalism

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 5 reads the early nineteenth-century emergence of the literary sketch as a response to metropolitan England’s continuing cultural authority in the British Atlantic world. The literary sketch—a short, anecdotal narrative form—rose to popularity almost simultaneously in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States as a means of describing local color and preserving regional differences. Instead of taking metropolitan England as a standard of cultural value, Scottish and Irish literary sketches asserted the competing significance of regional cultures. American writers including Washington Irving and Catharine Maria Sedgwick adopted the literary sketch to delineate the regional identities that developed within the United States as migrants from the British archipelago attempted to assimilate into an already racially and culturally complex American society.