European Local-Color Literature

Josephine Donovan is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maine, USA. She is the author or editor of twelve books, including the groundbreak Feminist Theory (3rd ed, 2000). She lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

"I learned a great deal from this thought provoking, compellingly informed and astutely insightful comparative study. As someone who works in literatures of the modern period and their intersections with history and politics—though as often beyond as within Europe, I found immensely valuable the elegantly configured and tremendously informative survey of European local-color literature and the incisive location of those local literatures both in their immediate socio-historical and literary contexts and in the broader European context. Professor Donovan's European Local-Color Literature brings into focus and situates literary works of which we should all be more aware. These significant if hitherto underexamined literary responses ‘to the institutions and ideologies of modernity' not only enrich our understanding of a rich and diverse 'premodern'—itself always already in a dialectic engagement with the modern that threatens it—as Professor Donovan points out in closing—they also offer suggestive alternatives to the formations and deformations of modernity. If a ‘nostalgia for a vanishing but beloved homeworld' (122) characterizes the rich specificity of much local-color literature, on our side of the confrontation between the modern and the 'premodern' the local specificity of those 'homeworlds' narrated in local-color literature remind us, too, at least of what was lost. At best though, in the insightful analyses of Professor Donovan's comparative study, they remind us of other ways of knowing, understanding, and relating to the human and non-human life and worlds around us. European Local-Color Literature offers, as well, a suggestive counterpoint to the resistance to European modernity that occurred in the non-European world confronted not only with modernity but with modernity in the imperial grasp of Europe. Professor Donovan's work has much to teach us all—whether in or beyond Europe." -- Mary N. Layoun, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

• Preface; Introduction; Chapter One: Local-Color Literature and the Colonizations of Modernity; Chapter Two: The Irish National Tale; Chapter Three: The Scottish National Tale; Chapter Four: Dorfgeschichte: The German Village Tale; Chapter Five: Romans Champetres: French Provincial Literature; Epilogue: A Sketch of the Local-Color Movement in Other Countries; Works Cited and Other Relevant Titles.