European Local-Color Literature

Josephine Donovan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Maine, USA. She is the author or editor of 13 books, including Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726 (2d. rev. ed., 2013), which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, After the Fall (1989), and The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007, co-edited with Carol J. Adams). Her groundbreaking Feminist Theory (first published, 1985; fourth edition, 2012), which was also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and described as “the classic survey and analysis of the roots and development of feminist theory,” has been translated into Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese.

"After contributing significantly to the re-assessment of local color writing in the United States, Josephine Donovan's comparative study of European local color literatures again breaks important new ground in the writing of modern literary history. Her analyses of nineteenth-century local color writing in Ireland, in Scotland, in several German speaking countries, and in France reveal the transatlantic scope of a genre that forcefully participated in discourses of modernization. The study's Foucaultian approach that insists on the cultural relevance of local knowledges, its rich historical contextualization of the respective literatures, and its comprehensive discussion of a large number of texts provide a powerful argument for the relevance of the genre and prepare the ground for further exploration." -- Sylvia Mayer, Chair of American Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany

• 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 Champêtres: French Provincial Literature Epilogue: A Sketch of the Local-Color Movement in Other Countries Works Cited and Other Relevant Titles