Together by Accident

Stephanie C. Palmer reassesses the cultural work of local color literature written during the postbellum and Gilded Age in the United States. To do so, Palmer traces the meaning of the regional travel accident motif through local color texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others.

This fascinating account of the regional travel accident motif within American local color literature offers a reassessment of the cultural work done by authors writing during the Gilded Age. Stephanie C. Palmer shows how events like broken carriage wheels and missed trains were used by local color authors to bring together bourgeois and lower-class characters, thus giving readers the opportunity to see modernity coming into contact with both rural and urban life. Using the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and others, Palmer traces the use of the regional travel accident motif and how local color writers employed it to give critiques on class, society, and modern life. Exploring the themes of regional identity, modernity, and interpersonal relationships, Together by Accident offers an intriguing evaluation of the innovations and inconveniences associated with life during the industrializing Gilded Age in America.

1 Table of Contents Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 1. Can the Genteel Writer Write the Local Novel?: Caroline Kirkland, Eliza Farnham, and Rose Terry Cooke Chapter 4 2. Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside: Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett Chapter 5 3. Travel Delays and Provincial Ambition: Rebecca Harding Davis and Thomas Detter Chapter 6 4. Realist Magic in the Country and the City: William Dean Howells Chapter 7 5. Angry Reform from Elsewhere in New England: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Chapter 8 Epilogue 9 Notes 10 Bibliography 11 Index 12 About the Author