T here is nothing new about a regional tradition in American
literature. It is as old as the Native American legends, as
evocative as the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Bret Harte, as
resonant as the novels of William Faulkner and the plays of
Tennessee Williams. For a time, though, during the post-World War
II era, tradition seemed to disappear into the shadows -- unless
one considers, perhaps correctly, that urban fiction is a form of
regionalism. Nonetheless, for the past decade or so, regionalism
has been making a triumphant return in American literature,
enabling readers to get a sense of place as well as a sense of time
and humanity. And it is as prevalent in popular fiction, such as
detective stories, as it is in classic literature -- novels, short
stories, and drama.
There are several possible reasons for this occurrence. For one
thing, all of the arts in America have been decentralized over the
past generation. Theater, music, and dance are as likely to thrive
in cities in the U.S. South, Southwest, and Northwest as in major
cities such as New York and Chicago. Movie companies shoot films
across the United States, on myriad locations. So it is with
literature. Smaller publishing houses that concentrate on fiction
thrive outside of New York City's "publishers row." Writers
workshops and conferences are more in vogue than ever, as are
literature courses on college campuses across the country. It is no
wonder that budding talents can surface anywhere. All one needs is
a pencil, paper, and a vision.
The most refreshing aspects of the new regionalism are its expanse
and its diversity. It canvasses America, from East to West. A
transcontinental literary tour begins in the Northeast, in Albany,
New York, the focus of interest of its native son, one-time
journalist William Kennedy. Kennedy, whose Albany novels -- among
them Ironweed (1983) and Very Old Bones (1992) -- capture
elegaically and often raucously the lives of the denizens of the
streets and saloons of the New York State capital city.
Prolific novelist, story writer, poet, and essayist Joyce Carol
Oates also hails from the northeastern United States. In her
haunting works, obsessed characters' attempts to achieve
fulfillment within their grotesque environments lead them into
destruction. Some of her finest works are stories in collections
such as The Wheel of Love (1970) and Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been? (1974). Stephen King, the best-selling master of
horror fiction, generally sets his suspenseful page-turners in
Maine -- within the same region.
Down the coast, in the environs of Baltimore, Maryland, Anne Tyler
presents, in spare, quiet language, extraordinary lives and
striking characters. Novels such as Dinner at the Homesick
Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons
(1988), and Saint Maybe (1991) have helped boost her reputation in
literary circles and among mass audiences.
A short distance from Baltimore is America's capital, Washington,
which has its own literary tradition, if a shrouded one, in a city
whose chief preoccupation is politics. Among the more lucid
portrayers of life in and on the fringe of government and power is
novelist Ward Just, a former international correspondent who
assumed a second career writing about the world he knows best --
the world of journalists, politicians, diplomats, and soldiers.
Just's Nicholson at Large (1975), a study of a Washington newsman
during and after the John F. Kennedy presidency of the early 1960s;
In the City of Fear (1982), a glimpse of Washington during the
Vietnam era; and Jack Gance (1989), a sobering look at a Chicago
politician and his rise to the U.S. Senate, are some of his more
impressive works. Susan Richards Shreve's Children of Power (1979)
assesses the private lives of a group of sons and daughters of
government officials, while popular novelist Tom Clancy, a Maryland
resident, has used the Washington politico-military landscape as
the launching pad for his series of epic suspense tales.
Moving southward, Reynolds Price and Jill McCorkle come into view.
Price, Tyler's mentor, was once described during the 1970s by a
critic as being in the obsolescent post of "southern-writer-
in-residence." He first came to attention with his novel A Long and
Happy Life (1962), dealing with the people and the land of eastern
North Carolina, and specifically with a young woman named Rosacoke
Mustian. He continued writing tales of this heroine over the
ensuing years, then shifted his locus to other themes before
focusing again on a woman in his acclaimed work, Kate Vaiden
(1986), his only novel written in the first person. Price's latest
novel, Blue Calhoun (1992),examines the impact of a passionate but
doomed love affair over the decades of family life.
McCorkle, born in 1958 and thus representing a new generation, has
dev oted her novels and short stories -- set in the small towns of
North Carolina -- to exploring the mystiques of teenagers (The
Cheer Leader, 1984), the links between generations (Tending to
Virginia, 1987), and the particular sensibilities of contemporary
suthern women (Crash Diet, 1992).
In the same region is Pat Conroy, whose bracing autobiographical
novels about his South Carolina upbringing and his abusive,
tyrannical father (The Great Santini, 1976; The Prince of Tides,
1986) are infused with a sense of the natural beauty of the South
Carolina low country.
Shelby Foote, a Mississippi native who has
lived in Memphis, Tennessee, for years, is an old-time chronicler
of the South whose histories and fictions led to his role on camera
in a successful public television series on the U.S. Civil War.
America's heartland reveals a wealth of writing talent. Among them
are Jane Smiley, who teaches writing at the University of Iowa.
Smiley won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Thousand Acres
(1991), which transplanted Shakespeare's King Lear to a midwestern
U.S. farm and chronicled the bitter family feud unleashed when an
aging farmer decides to turn over his land to his three
daughters.
Texas chronicler Larry McMurtry covers his native state in varying
time periods and sensibilities, from the vanished 19th- century
West (Lonesome Dove, 1985; Anything For Billy, 1988) to the
vanishing small towns of the postwar era (The Last Picture Show,
1966).
Cormac McCarthy, whose explorations of the American Southwest
desert limn his novels Blood Meridian (1985), All The Pretty Horses
(1992), and The Crossing (1994), is a reclusive, immensely
imaginative writer who is just beginning to get his due on the U.S.
literary scene. Generally considered the rightful heir to the
southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy is as intrigued by the wildness
of the terrain as he is by human wildness and unpredictability.
Set in the striking landscape of her native New Mexico, Native
American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko's critically esteemed novel
Ceremony (1977) has gained a large general audience. Like N. Scott
Momaday's poetic The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), it is a "chant
novel" structured on Native American healing rituals. Silko's novel
The Almanac of the Dead (1991) offers a panorama of the Southwest,
from ancient tribal migrations to present-day drug runners and
corrupt real estate developers reaping profits by misusing the
land. Best-selling detective writer Tony Hillerman, who lives in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, covers the same southwestern U.S. territory,
featuring two modest, hardworking Navajo policemen as his
protagonists.
To the north, in Montana, poet James Welch details the struggles of
Native Americans to wrest meaning from harsh reservation life beset
by poverty and alcoholism in his slender, nearly flawless novels
Winter in the Blood (1974), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), Fools
Crow (1986), and The Indian Lawyer (1990). Another Montanan is
Thomas McGuane, whose unfailingly masculine-focused novels --
including Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973) and Keep the Change (1989)
-- evince a dream of roots amidst rootlessness. Louise Erdrich, who
is part Chippewa Indian, has set a powerful series of novels in
neighboring North Dakota. In works such as Love Medicine (1984),
she captures the tangled lives of dysfunctional reservation
families with a poignant blend of stoicism and humor.
Two writers have exemplified the Far West for some time. One of
these is the late Wallace Stegner, who was born in the Midwest in
1909 and died in an automobile accident in 1993. Stegner spent the
bulk of his life in various locales in the West and had a regional
outlook even before it became the vogue. His first major work, The
Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), chronicles a family caught up in
the American dream in its western guise as the frontier
disappeared. It ranges across America, from Minnesota to Washington
State, and concerns, as Stegner put it, "that place of impossible
loveliness that pulled the whole nation westward." His 1971
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, is also imbued with
the spirit of place in its portrait of a woman illustrator and
writer of the Old West. Indeed, Stegner's strength as a writer was
in characterization, as well as in evoking the ruggedness of
western life.
Joan Didion -- who is as much journalist as novelist and whose
mind's eye has traveled far afield in recent years -- put
contemporary California on the map in her 1968 volume of nonfiction
pieces, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and in her incisive, shocking
novel about the aimlessness of the Hollywood scene, Play It As It
Lays (1970).
The Pacific Northwest -- one of the more fertile artistic regions
across the cultural landscape at the outset of the 1990s --
produced, among others, Raymond Carver, a marvelous writer of short
fiction. Carver died tragically in 1988 at the age of 50, not long
after coming into his own on the literary scene. In mirroring the
working-class mindset of the inhabitants of his region in
collections such as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
(1974) and Where I'm Calling From (1986), he placed them against
the backdrop of their scenic surroundings, still largely
unspoiled.
The success of the regional theater movement -- nonprofit
institutional companies that have become havens of contemporary
culture in city after city across America -- since the early 1960s
most notably has nurtured young dramatists who have become some of
the more luminous imagists on the theatrical scene. One wonders
what American theater and literature would be like today without
the coruscating, fragmented society and tempestuous relationships
of Sam Shepard (Buried Child, 1979; A Lie of the Mind, 1985); the
amoral characters and shell-shocking staccato dialogue of Chicago's
David Mamet (American Buffalo, 1976; Glengarry Glen Ross, 1982);
the intrusion of traditional values into midwestern lives and
concerns reflected by Lanford Wilson (5th of July, 1978; Talley's
Folly, 1979); and the Southern eccentricities of Beth Henley
(Crimes of the Heart, 1979).
American literature has traversed an extended, winding path from
pre-colonial days to contemporary times. Society, history,
technology all have had telling impact on it. Ultimately, though,
there is a constant -- humanity, with all its radiance and its
malevolence, its tradition and its promise.
THE NEW REGIONALISM
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Для автора это очень важно, это стимулирует его на новое творчество!