The Aesthetic Features and Significance of the Veritism in Garland’s Short Stories - A Study on Main-Travelled Roads

Hamlin Garland, an influential American writer, puts forward his literary theory—Veritism. His collection of short stories-Main-Travelled Roads insists on describing the real situation of Midwest and West rural areas by using “Veritism”, as well as expresses the great humanistic concern and deep thinking about the changes that had taken place between urban and rural areas. By analyzing the figures and plots of Main-Travelled Roads, this paper will reveal humanism and classical sensibility, happy endings, and aesthetic value in it, and let readers understand the theme of the short stories thoroughly, and appreciate the Veritism comprehensively.

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

An Analysis of the Father’s and Mother’s Image in Hamlin Garland’s Short Stories

Hamlin Garland, an influential American writer, describes the images of fathers and mothers in their everyday west-frontier lifestyle. By analyzing those figures, this paper will reveal the social significance of his work, his writing style, and his literary views: Veritism.