Table of Contents:
  • Toward a theory
  • Art's region
  • Literary progress
  • Democratic vistas and the cosmopolitan charge
  • Cosmopolitanism
  • 1850-1900
  • Representative fiction
  • Hamlin Garland's provincial literature
  • Local color
  • 1900-1930
  • The ends of local color
  • Willa Cather's parables of authorship
  • The critical distance of Wharton, Johnson, Masters, and Frederick
  • The revolt from the village: Anderson, Lewis, Suckow
  • The southern renaissance and the world's body
  • The passport to this world: Harlem, Hester Street, and beyond
  • The rest
  • After 1930
  • The new new regionalism and the future of literature.