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The painting of modern light : local color before regionalism
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Schroeder, Jonathan D. S. (2014) The painting of modern light : local color before regionalism. American Literature, 86 (3). pp. 551-581. doi:10.1215/00029831-2717407
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2717407
Abstract
Schroeder’s essay works to draw critical attention to the aesthetic history of local color, and, more broadly, to the underrecognized relation between local color and realism. In returning local color to its long aesthetic history within painting, Schroeder argues that its primary purpose within realism was not the delineation of regions, but rather the production of an affective and aesthetic engagement with the cosmopolitan project of self-cultivation. The local-color detail was generally not used as a representative detail of a place, but rather, by the late-nineteenth century, as an indexical trace of the invisible truths of an object, and particularly the invisible processes that made human populations distinctive. By bringing this attention to local color’s color, Schroeder aims to move critical debates away from considerations of place-based content of local-color stories and toward a recognition of how local color constituted an aesthetic that could be configured in radically antithetical ways by an archrealist like Mary Murfree and an impressionist like Hamlin Garland. Ultimately, local color helps us see realism not as an indiscriminate, antiliterary, transparent representation of the world, but rather as a highly discriminating, distinctive style that was consistently engaged with the twin principles of human self-cultivation and the neoclassical economy of representation. The example of Garland’s Crumbling Idols has proven so illuminating for this essay precisely because of how it reacts against this formation, as well as how it suggests an alternative, unconscious receptivity to the detail that foreshadows American modernism and regionalism.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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| Subjects: | N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR N Fine Arts > ND Painting P Language and Literature > PR English literature P Language and Literature > PS American literature |
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Color in art , Realism in art , Aesthetics, Modern, American literature -- 19th century, Art and literature | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | American Literature | ||||||
| Publisher: | Duke University Press | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0002-9831 | ||||||
| Official Date: | 1 September 2014 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Date of first compliant deposit: | 24 July 2019 | ||||||
| Volume: | 86 | ||||||
| Number: | 3 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 551-581 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1215/00029831-2717407 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
| Copyright Holders: | © 2014 by Duke University Press | ||||||
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