Revolt of the provinces

Description

Regionalism emerged across America during the 1920s and 1930s as an artistic and intelectual revolt against postwar urban industrialization. Robert Dorman tells the story of this movement through the works and careers of the writers, artists, historians, land-use planners, literary critics, and social scientists who launched it, including such noted figures as Lewis Mumford, Mary Austin, Donald Davidson, Howard Odum, and Mari Sandoz. He establishes regionalism as a nationwide critique of American society, a case study in the formulation of social democratic ideology, and a vital though neglected chapter in American environmental history and thought. From the agrarian South, the desert Southwest, the rural Midwest, the Pacific, Northwest, and New England villages, regionalists looked homeward to the myths, values, and landscapes of their native provinces for answers to the erosion of America's regional fabric by the forces of modernization. They sought to defend and preserve the remnants of diverse and authentic local cultures by formulating a regional framework for the utopian restructuring of industrial American. Dorman contends that regionalism's celebration of African, European, and Native American cultures laid the foundation for our current debate over pluralist democracy.

First Sentence

The life and works of Willa Cather, treated emblematically, provide some helpful guideposts into the regionalist sensibility that emerged among a generation of American artists and intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Revolt of the provinces: the regionalist movement in America, 1920-1945University of North Carolina Press1993-01-01
• Revolt of the ProvincesUniversity of North Carolina Press2000-01-01
• Revolt of the ProvincesPaperbackUniversity of North Carolina Press2003-10-01