Writing from the Margins: Transregional Approaches to Fin de Siècle American Literature

In this project, I investigate how regional American literatures between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries create transregional discourses. A loan word from world history, transregionalism identifies economic and cultural connections across large geospatial regions. A transregional approach to American literature would serve a similar purpose, albeit at smaller spatial and cultural scales within the United States. To demonstrate these cultural discourses across regions, I propose to analyze how Theodore Dreiser, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Mary Austin, and Frances E. W. Harper discuss spatial and generic movements within their fiction. For the first analysis, transregional approaches to American literature uses spatial theory and critical regional studies to investigate the production of space in regional American texts. By production of space, I refer to Henri Lefebvre’s famous declaration that space is socially produced. In the nineteenth-century U.S., authors and citizens had competing social scales and identities, with the national subjective perceiving citizenship through racial, socioeconomic, and gendered identity markers. Regions become counternarratives to this construction; therefore, in those cultural spaces, authors often combat the perception of American citizenry as white middle-class, and male. The authors plot their criticisms through spatial movement within and between regions, as well as discussions of spatial transformations. For the second analysis, transregional approaches to American literature demonstrates the permeable boundaries of late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries literary genres. American authors crafted and experimented in various literary genres during the early postbellum decades. Genres that emerged during these formative years include realism, naturalism, and early experimentations with American modernism. Another literary experimentation—regionalism—begins as a hybrid genre that mixes antebellum romanticism and postbellum realist qualities. I concur with other literary critics that regionalism grants authorial space for minority and oppressed voices. In this way, regionalism allows authors to comment on American culture.