Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
Since its brief flowering in the third and fourth decades of this century, regionalism has been generally dismissed as insignificant by students of American culture. While the U.S. intellectual mainstream rushed off toward both modernism and the movies, regionalists remained determined denizens of their various backwaters. Painter Thomas Hart Benton's rejection of New York abstraction for heartland folk murals in Missouri is both well known and emblematic. In his book, Revolt of the Provinces, Robert Dorman has reopened the subject of regionalism in thought-provoking fashion. Dorman claims for regionalism a wider significance than has been granted by many critics. He argues that the motley group of artists, writers, academics, city planners, and other intellectuals loosely unified under the rubric of "regionalism" were, in fact, cultural radicals who sought to produce a new, integrated American culture and society. Facing the vulgarities of mass culture and industrial society, regionalists relied on sense of place as an antidote, grounding themselves firmly in the local particularities of American earth. From this vantage point they celebrated the comforts of place, "the lived environment as a unique historical, cultural, and physical entity, and as a key to a fully human life" (p. 23).
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:1 (Winter 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.