LOCAL COLOR
19th-century Regional Writing in the United States



Notes from TOURISM



1 Western New England and New York, and the Rhode Island and Connecticut coasts were the first resort areas to develop; Virginia's White Springs was the only significant vacation spot in the South up through the 1850's because, for the most part, Southerners tended to go north to escape the heat. Only when the pressures leading up to the war began to spawn a sense that they were being treated inhospitably by their northern hosts did Southerners develop an alternative network of vacation spots. See Hans Huth, Nature and the American, (Berkeley: U California P, 1957).

2 Thomas J. Schlereth, Victorian America, (NY: HarperColllins Publishers, 1992), 213-7. Cindy Sondik Aron, "Vacations and Resorts," in Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, eds, The Reader's Companion to American History, (NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991), 1107-10.

3 Huth, 106-7.

4 Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), chpt 1.

5 Huth, 86.

6 Silber, 72; John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century, (NY: Oxford UP, 1989), 160-1; Hugh DeSantis,"The Democratization of Travel: The Travel Agent in American History," The Journal of American Culture, (Spring 1978), 5.

7 Silber, 92.

8 Brodhead, 151. My own research into postbellum American domestic tourism corroborates his speculations on this subject. The connections are actually, as I argue here, more explicit and extensive than he suggests.

9 Silber, 73.

10 Valene L. Smith ed, Introduction, Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, 2nd ed, (Philadelphia: U Pa U, 1989), 12-3.

11 Silber, 77-9. DeSantis, 7-8.

12 While Local Color as a genre contains plenty of "romantic" works, none of them present tourists as characters (unless Country of the Pointed Firs is categorized this way); the texts I am about to discuss are, by default, realistic in the Howellsian sense. As such, they share in his transliterary endeavor to attract readers and condition them to participate in a society where social distinctions are based upon the merits of an individual's character and behavior (as judged by an emergent bourgeois moral code: not blood, inheritances, or the more superficial and performative "personality"). For an excellent articulation of Howells' attempt to fashion realism into a force capable of constructing 'the real,' see Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1988 ) 1-43.




Go back to TOURISM

CONTEXT: TIMELINES

REGIONS, TEXTS, AND AUTHORS: WHO'S WHO

LITERARY THEORY: "LOCAL COLOR" QUARRELS

REGIONAL WRITING HOMEPAGE






"Nineteenth-century Regional Writing in the United States" is the work of Dottie Webb. For suggestions, complaints, cattle-rustling schemes or gossiping over the fence in neighborly fashion, send e-correspondence to at148@traverse.lib.mi.us

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This document was last modified 5/14/97.