The Revolt From The Village

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e) Preface

Until the early years of the Twentieth Century, American fiction followed the traditions established by Oliver Goldsmith’s sentimental poem, “The Deserted Village”, wherein, the small-town was depicted as an idyllic place over which brooded the spirit of rural contentment. The local color writings covering the nostalgic sketches of quiet New England villages and of the literary communities there, had constituted the best of all possible settings for romantic stories of self-reliance and self-sacrifice, e.g. Thomas Nelson Page’s “Tales of Southern Gentry” and Sarah Orme Jewett’s nostalgic quiet New England-village tales. (15). But this was the trend of the celebration of Provincialism.

f) Minor Phase

As a dissent against this culture, there grew up the “Revolt from the Village”. Edward Eggleston in “The Hoosier School Master” (1871) had depicted the barrenness of life in the rural communities of the Middle West, Edger Watson Howe’s “The Story of a Country Town” (1883), and Harold Frederic’s “The Damnation of Theron Ware” (1896), especially Harold Frederic’s social realism had attracted Sinclair Lewis. This became a source for his attack on the evangelists and their narrow fundamentalism in “Elmer Gantry” (1927). In Hamlin Garland’s “Main Traveled Roads” (1890), and “A Son of the Middle Border” (1917), there was a record of a forceful and eloquent protest against the toil and deprivation of life in the town and on the farms of the American Prairie States.

g) Major Phase

With the publication of Edgar Lee Master’s “Spoon River Anthology”, this cult of the “Revolt from the Village” entered its major phase.

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