European Local-Color Literature: National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, Romans Champêtres by Josephine Donovan (review)

Having pioneered research into a previously critically neglected field of literary production in New England Color-Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (1983), Josephine Donovan extends her assessment of that form of writing beyond the American context in this study of its European origins and dimensions. Her resultant presentation of local-color literature as a subversive reaction to the imposition of Enlightenment modernity by dominant metropolitan cultures draws on Michel Foucault’s advocacy of the value of “subjugated literatures” while offering original insights into the challenges posed by the traditions of colonized peoples to the imperial processes of standardization and rationalization.

An initial description of local-color literature as a “movement that flourished in most Western countries in the nineteenth century” leads immediately to the claim that it emerged first in Ireland, “with Maria Edgeworth’s short novel Castle Rackrent (1800) acknowledged as the founding work in the genre” (1). Given this reference to genre, a definition of what constitutes local-color literature and an outline of its distinctive features would have been useful here, if only to justify the opening description and claim. In what follows, Donovan subjects a selection of Irish and Scottish national tales, German village tales (Dorfgeschichten), and French provincial stories (romans champêtres) to scrutiny. With a chapter devoted to each of these subgenres of fiction, this wide-ranging and sometimes thought-provoking study of a large number of texts provides convincing support for the central thesis that local-color literature both reflects and negotiates the struggle between hegemonic imperialism and the colonized subject. Mention is made of Scandinavian, Spanish, Italian and Russian provincial novels in an epilogue, in which Donavan also outlines European influences on the development of local-color writing in America. Arguing that local wisdom and knowledge, rooted in a defiant valorization of a particular place, “offer powerful alternatives to the institutions and ideologies that now rule our lives” (179), she concludes by suggesting that nineteenth-century, European local-color literature retains its relevance for twenty-first-century readers everywhere.

While the preceding pages provide scant justification for this provocative conclusion, Donovan’s central thesis is supported throughout by her discussion of fictional stories by an impressive, if selective, range of Irish, Scottish, German and French writers, many of whom will be unfamiliar to her readers. Unfortunately, however, the decision to confine her study to nineteenth-century examples of a limited range of narrative forms renders this comparative literary analysis less valuable than it might otherwise have been. More familiarity with recent critical debates and differing approaches to the various literatures under discussion would have made the comparative analysis more effective; it is telling that in the chapter devoted to “The Irish National Tale,” only one of the cited secondary sources was published in the new millennium, while another, thrice-cited, short reference work dates back to 1946. Donovan’s identification of Castle Rackrent as the first example of European local-color writing is particularly problematic, as it suggests a lack of awareness of the wealth of recent scholarship on the rise of the novel, particularly in the Irish context. Although Edgeworth’s novel may still be generally regarded as the first Irish national tale, it is not the first example of Irish local-color fiction, if that term denotes stories that involve the detailed representation of a distinctive, regional setting at a particular time. As early as 1693, the anonymously authored Vertue Rewarded; or, The Irish Princess, set in the provincial town of Clonmel during the summer of 1690 in the period immediately following the historically decisive and divisive victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, offered readers insights not only into local customs, conditions, values and topography but also into the complex political tensions of the contemporary moment. Although Vertue Rewarded fits well with Donovan’s characterization of local-color literature as a form of writing that affirms cultural difference in an attempt to...