ABSTRACT
Regionalism is a name for a condition under which the national American literature exists as a literature: that is, its constant tendency to decentralize rather than to centralize; or to correct overcentralization by conscious decentralization. A regional literature, so-called, may thus very well be, among other things, a selfconscious expression of the life of a region. The national literature is the compound of the regional impulses, not antithetical to them, but embracing them and living in them as the roots, branch, and flower of its being. The concept of a national literature is a modern phenomenon, produced by the rise of the European nations to selfconsciousness during the later stages of the Renaissance. If the modern Englishman had evolved from a one-cell organism up to the state of Victorian complexity represented in Mr. Gladstone, then English literature had to be exhibited as mounting nobly up the evolutionary ladder from amoebic verse to the lofty periods of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
