Contents

Point out the chief characteristics of the Regional novel.

The regional novel emphasizes the setting, speech and customs of a particular locality, not merely as local colour, but as important conditions affecting the temperament of the characters and their ways of thinking, feeling and acting. The regional novel is concerned with an accurate depiction of the manners, morals, dialects and scenery of a particular geographical area but the word regional usually implies a wider interest because a regional novel tends to be centred in a particular geographical area but it has also a more general interest. Regional fiction is generally realistic and is likely to concern itself with life in rural areas or small towns rather than urban centres.

The regional novel concentrates on a particular part particular region of a nation and depicts the life of that region. A more serious accusation against regional fiction is that it is too local, not sufficient universal in its reference. With this goes the complaint that it is too homely, preoccupied with what George Eliot calls’ vulgar details.’ Its great merit is its brilliant illuminations of landscape. Its transcendent merit is that of verisimilitude. It contains a detailed faithfulness to reality. It reveals a conscientious presentation of phenomena as they really happen in ordinary everyday life on a clearly defined spot of real earth. It shows a firm rejection of the vague, the high flown and the sentimental. It depicts an equally firm contact with the real, these are the marks of the regional novel which occupies infiction the place of the Dutch school of painters in art.”

The regional novel is essentially democratic. It expresses a belief that the ordinary men and the ordinary women are interesting and worth depicting. Its use of the craftsman type as main characters is one of its great contributions to human progress. It has a particular strength in the depiction of character for the two great factors in the formation of character are heredity and environment, and in regional fiction characters are shown in their native environment and surrounded by their families-their ancestors and their descendants. In regional novels the characters always appear, for indeed they always do in provincial life, strongly individual, because well known to all in that district, in their own home town or village persons never become anonymous ‘masses’, but remain individual man.” We may say that locality, reality and democracy are the watchwards of the english regional novelist and the contribution of his work in literature.”