An authentic identity, as a first nature, is a place to which we cannot return (Bhabha, The Location of Culture)The concept of region offers an entree into many disciplines and a valuable contribution to the humanities involvement with other areas. In the context of regional studies, literary critics may have the opportunity to analyse the function of place in literature (Lutwack 1984), its relationship with nature, history, economics, religion and above all, culture. Human behaviour shapes landscape, cultural forces affect nature as natural forces shape the lives of people. Collective needs, tastes, predilections, values and attitudes of are revealed by both a cultural and natural landscape brought to light in literature. Emphasising the regional and combining with international and national views is a form of bridging the gap between lowbrow and highbrow traditions as of enhancing individual self understanding and diversity in a collective wider community.Literary studies have, however, been distrustful of regional approaches and regionalist literature right from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings; regionalist has been seen as a way of diminishing the great tradition of Western thought and culture, regions were connected with the past and faced, sometimes with justification, as reactionary obstacles to progress, curious and colourful survivals of a bygone time. Aesthetically this subgenre is often considered as a naive approach to complex reality and defined as fiction that is set in a recognisable region, and which describes features distinguishing the life, social relations, customs, language, dialect or other aspects of the culture of that area and its people (Snell 1998: 1)1. It grew in England, as in other European countries, by the mid nineteenth century hand in hand with the proliferation of travel books, the interest for landscape, the development of photography and realist painting, the interest for ethnography, folklore2 and human geography. Sandra Zagarell labels it as narrative of community saying that it represents a coherent response to the social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes caused by industrialism, urbanization, and the spread of capitalism (Zagarell 1988: 499). In 1921, the edition by Emmanuel de Martonne of Paul Vidal de La Blache's fundamental Principes de Geographie Humaine (La Blache died while writing the book) this author, influenced by Alexander von Humboldt and by Friedrich Ratzel's antropogeography concept, emphasised the principle of terrestrial unity and the conception of environment as composite, capable of grouping and of holding together heterogeneous beings in mutual vital interrelationships(La Blache 1996: 185) and above all the importance of Man as a geographical factor, both active and passive, joining nature in nature's game, in the transformation of living conditions and forces3. In literature, rebellious and questioning European modernism seemed to relegate and sentence regionalism to cultural history; the modern journey is predominantly internal; Brazilian literature, however, showed quite early (1922) that the sentence was not valid. In 2002 the Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference was titled Regionalism and the Modern; here three areas were considered: modernism in space, of regions; modernism in the social world, of identities; and in narrative, of time. In spring 2009 the prestigious periodical Modern Fiction Studies published a volume about regional modernism which explores the relationship and intersections between regionalism and modernism.Clearly, in opposition to the traditional view that anything regional is incompatible with a larger vision of the world, in our contemporary time, regions and regional life have a different meaning and value, a different relation with the centres and nation states. If modernization homogenizes it also heightens regional differences and may even create new group identities. …
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Jan 30, 2019
Estelle Fourat 
Open Access
