Violet America : regional cosmopolitanism in U.S. fiction since the Great Depression / Jason Arthur.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : regional cosmopolitanism -- Specific soil : James Agee and the poverty of documentary work -- Pavement : Jack Kerouac and the delocalization of America -- The Chinatown and the city : Maxine Hong Kingston and the relocalization of San Francisco -- The deflowering of New England : Russell Banks and the wages of cosmopolitanism -- Violet America : Jonathan Franzen and the unity of discord.

Print version record.

This book takes on the long habit among literary historians and critics of thinking about large segments of American literary production in terms of regionalism. The author argues that classifying broad swaths of American literature as regionalist or "local color" writing brings with it a set of assumptions, informed by longstanding habits of thought about American culture, that marginalize important literary works and deform our understanding of them. Moreover, these assumptions reinforce our ideas about the divisions between city and country, coast and center, cosmopolitan and provincial that lie behind not only our literature, but our politics.

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