A groundbreaking comparison of utopian and regionalist American literatures between the end of Reconstruction and the first World War

Regionalism and Utopia challenges prevailing notions of regionalist fiction as bourgeois nostalgia by locating within its content and form a radical, utopian impulse. By drawing out their engagement with socialist, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental protection movements, Andy Harper shows how regionalist texts performed both the utopian work of envisioning progressive futures and the necessarily regionalist work of orienting and charting a path toward those futures on a localized scale.

Scholars’ historical understanding of social movements during the Long Gilded Age is largely framed in the Nationalist and proto-Progressive politics of much overtly utopian fiction. But, Harper’s comparative readings of Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Kate Chopin, and Sui Sin Far reveal within regionalist fiction a more radically democratic model for social change. Regionalist writers of the 1870s through the 1910s, as Harper shows, imagined the local rather than the national as the scale on which social change could, and should, be carried out.