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'Favored In My Birthplace': Local Roots And Cultural Identity In Victorian Writing, Patrick G. Scott

Faculty Publications

Discusses the vocabularies in which literary critics since Matthew Arnold have described writing about place ("local," "regional," "national," "cosmopolitan," "peripheral," "central," "universal," "parochial," and "provincial"), and the differing perspectives of writers from Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy, to argue that the Victorian recognition of and ambivalence about provinciality is of lasting significance for understanding cultural identity in complex societies.