Race And Culture In New Orleans Stories

Download or read book Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories written by James Nagel and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of these historical factors energize and enrich the fiction of this important region. The literary context of these volumes is also central to understanding their place in literary history. They are short-story cycles--collections of short fiction that contain unifying settings, recurring characters or character types, and central themes and motifs. They are also examples of the "local color" tradition in fiction, a movement that has been much misunderstood. Nagel maintains that "local color" literature was meant to be the highest form of American writing, not the lowest, and its objective was to capture the locations, folkways, values, dialects, conflicts, and ways of life in the various regions of the country in order to show that the lives of common citizens were sufficiently important to be the subject of serious literature.