Translation and transnationalism in American regional literature

This dissertation studies the non-English languages, dialects, and translations within the English-language writing of American women regionalists (1872 to 1932). Rather than reiterating the paradigm that assumes regionalism to be the minor partner of realism in part because of regionalism's use of "local color" in the speech of its characters, the dissertation argues for the critical and political potential of this multilingualism. It considers a variety of non-English languages: the dialects and foreign languages spoken by regional characters, the translations provided within regionalist texts, and translations of these texts themselves into French. From Kate Chopin's Creole- and French-speaking residents of New Orleans to Therese Bentzon's late-nineteenth century French translations of the texts of Sarah Orne Jewett and Grace Elizabeth King to Mary Austin's translations of Native American poetry, I argue that regionalism challenges the emerging "standard" of literary English in the United States during the nineteenth century---the very era of national consolidation and standardization.; In contrast to what translation theorist Lawrence Venuti deems the historically tacit practice of understanding translation as invisible, the dissertation contends that within their multilingual American literature, regionalists made translation visible. This visibility illuminates international influences between American and other national literatures. The international circulation of American regional writing in translation during the nineteenth century compounds and complicates the links translation forges between the national canon and world literature. This multilingual fiction thus produces a series of geographies, including the regional, the national, and the global. With all three geographies functioning as contexts for American regional literature, these texts create a layered space that might figured as a palimpsest. The regional---traditionally attributed to the late nineteenth century's past, the national---traditionally attributed to the late nineteenth century's present, and the international---traditionally attributed to the imperial turn of the twentieth century---are all simultaneously present in American regionalism.