American literature in 19

centuryFrontier humor«local color»

«regionalism»

Two major literary currents in

19th-century America merged in Mark Twain: popular frontier humor and local color, or "regionalism." These related literary approaches began in the 1830s — and had even earlier roots in local oral traditions.

Exaggeration, tall tales, incredible

boasts, and comic workingmen heroes enlivened frontier literature. These humorous forms were found in many frontier regions — in the "old Southwest", the mining frontier, and the Pacific Coast

Each region had its colorful characters around

whom stories collected: Mike Fink, the Mississippi riverboat brawler; Casey Jones, the brave railroad engineer; John Henry, the steel-driving African-American; Paul Bunyan, the giant logger whose fame was helped along by advertising; westerners Kit Carson, the Indian fighter, and Davy Crockett, the scout. Their exploits were exaggerated and enhanced in ballads, newspapers, and magazines. Sometimes, as with Kit Carson and Davy Crockett, these stories were strung together into book form.

Twain, Faulkner, and many other writers, particularly southerners, are indebted to frontier pre-Civil War humorists such as Johnson Hooper, George Washington Harris, Augustus Longstreet, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and Joseph Baldwin.

From them and the American frontier folk came the wild proliferation of comical new American words: "absquatulate" (leave), "flabbergasted" (amazed), "rampagious" (unruly, rampaging). Local boasters, or "ring-tailed roarers," who asserted they were half horse, half alligator, also underscored the boundless energy of the frontier.

Twain's style – influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, direct and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently humorous – changed the way Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and sound distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents.

In 1879, thanks to the novel «Old Creoles Day» Cable gained fame in the American literary world.

Other writers interested in regional differences and dialect were: George W.

Cable

He served as Woodrow

Wilson's ambassador to Italy, and the president referred to him as a "national ornament"

Thomas Nelson Page

"Uncle Remus stories". His Songs and His Sayings was published near the end of 1880. Hundreds of newspapers reviewed the best-seller, and Harris received national attention.

Joel Chandler Harris

By the 1870s she

had begun writing stories for Appleton's Journal under the penname of "Charles Egbert Craddock"

Mary Noailles Murfree

Sarah Orne Jewett

She published her first important story in the Atlantic Monthly at age 19, and her reputation grew throughout the 1870s and 1880s.

O. Henry's short

stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings. 

William Sydney Porter (O. Henry)

A version of local color regionalism that

focused on minority experiences can be seen in the works of Charles W. Chesnutt (African American), of María Ruiz de Burton, one of the earliest Mexican American novelists to write in English, and in the Yiddish-inflected works of Abraham Cahan.

1. What is frontier humor and local color? 2. What are filled with Twain’s stories? 3. What humorous forms used representatives

of frontier humor and “local color” in their creations?

4. Name representatives of “local color” and regionalism.

5. What contributed representatives of local color in American letters?

Questions