Since the mid-2000s scholars from various disciplines have become increasingly interested in the relationship between regionalism and transnationalism or globalism.Footnote ¹ Jason Arthur's elegantly written study of post-Great Depression US writings, Violet America, takes up this line of inquiry and more specifically draws on Tom Lutz's seminal Cosmopolitan Vistas (2004). Indeed, Violet America may be considered a sequel to Cosmopolitan Vistas, not only since Arthur carries Lutz's attempt to locate “literary cosmopolitanism” (3) in US regional fiction into the period after the 1930s (to which Lutz had dedicated the epilogue of his volume), but also since Arthur shares Lutz's concern with the political implications, the civic purpose of reading (and writing about) fiction. The critic's job, Lutz wrote, “is neither to retreat from politics nor, in our literary work, to embrace any politics … We need to be large, to contain multitudes” (quoted at 199). Similarly, Arthur views “novel reading [as] a way of engaging the world, not of escaping it” (xxi), and contrasts the “regional cosmopolitanism” of the texts he reads with “the gridlock of red and blue states” (xxi) and with “cultural polarity” (31) in the US in general.

The writers and works to which Arthur ascribes the “power to ‘depolarize’ American culture” (xxi) are James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Jack Kerouac's On the Road; Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book; and Russell Banks's Hamilton Stark, Affliction, and The Darling (as well as Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City and The Corrections, in the epilogue). All of them, Arthur argues, display a “reconciliatory regional sensibility” that “engages global, ethical issues as they are lived in specific places and does so in a way that reveals interregional similarities,” which Arthur sees as a “particularly post-Depression phenomenon” (xviii). For instance, in the first chapter he analyzes Agee's Let Us as a regional cosmopolitan reaction to the regional imagination and stereotyping of New Deal cultures. Drawing attention to his own role in the production of documentary art about poverty, Agee refuses to sentimentalize and iconize poverty, which would sanction civic inaction (as it does, according to Arthur, in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath). Chapter 2 identifies “delocalization” as Kerouac's solution to cultural polarity. Kerouac's regional characters, Arthur writes, are “no longer anchored to their eponymous regions” (49), but rather to the road, a locale in itself that “conceptually thread[s] the disparate regions of the continent into some form of contact with one another” (43). In the third chapter, Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey is read as simultaneously an affirmation of Kerouac's delocalization and a critique of the cultural forms that this regional cosmopolitanism engenders among Kerouac's followers in San Francisco, namely a bohemian provincialism that remains completely oblivious to the multiculturalism of the city. Likewise, Arthur considers Russell Banks's fiction, particularly his novel Affliction, a critique of New England's self-centered provincialism: for Banks, Arthur argues, this nostalgia for “rose-colored” New England (98) is both destructive (as it sanctions violence) and self-destructive (as it makes the region afraid of economic and cultural progress). The Epilogue, finally, views the “alliance” between Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey as an emblematic act of depolarization, a way to draw readers out of “their interpretive comfort zones” (130) and bring them into dialogue with each other.

Previous reviews have complained, somewhat paradoxically, that the texts selected by Arthur for his study are either not “cosmopolitan” (i.e. inclusive) or not regional enough.Footnote ² Addressing the first point, one should mention that Arthur speaks of “the masculinization of regional fiction” (94), where the genre “actually gives content to the otherwise empty signifier of ‘white male’” (92). With respect to the second point, Violet America, while explicitly situating itself within the field of local-color/regionalism criticism, does indeed seem more interested in regional cosmopolitanism than in cosmopolitan regionalism. More importantly, however, one should take issue with some of Arthur's generalizing questions about the critical reception of local color and regionalism, e.g. “Why is regionalism still considered and taught as a discrete, nostalgic literary period?” (xii), or “[t]hen why does conventional wisdom still suggest that regionalism and cosmopolitanism are at odds?” (xiii). Since the mid-2000s, critical work on nineteenth-century local color by such scholars as Tom Lutz, Coby Dowdell, June Howard, and Emily Satterwhite has clearly shown that the genre cannot simply be considered nostalgic or at odds with cosmopolitanism.Footnote ³ This by no means detracts from the insightful arguments Arthur makes about the twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts he discusses, but it does jeopardize, to some extent, his thesis about regional cosmopolitanism being “particularly a post-Depression phenomenon” (xviii). What Arthur describes as rose-colored New England may not be too far away from violet America.