Regional and Provincial in Victorian Literature

Abstract

A conference like this provides an opportunity to reflect on the differing fortunes and status of the words ‘regional’ and ‘provincial’ in literary criticism. Although they are used often interchangeably, there is a distinction between them in modern usage. ‘Provincial’ and ‘provincialism’ are now, I take it, pejorative terms: they imply narrowness, dilution, a smug satisfaction with the local and the loss of due proportion that goes with it. ‘Regional’ and ‘regionalism’, on the other hand, are at the least neutral, and more usually positive terms, suggesting valid and vigorous differences from metropolitan norms — attractive alternative modes of speech, custom, landscape, culture. Good regional art, we acknowledge, is in touch with universals, with the paradigms of myth or tragedy, with the forces of history, with the submerged kingdoms of race and nation.