Regional, National and Post-Colonial (I)

Abstract

In a conference on the Literature of Region and Nation, held at Aberdeen in 1986, Seamus Heaney was able to say quite casually that ‘we are all regionalists now’. His point is that in the latter part of the twentieth century there has been a decline (and, by and large, he regards it as a welcome decline) in the feeling that English literature has its centre in London and the south-east of England. Regionalism as a literary phenomenon in England began in the late eighteenth century in the work of Wordsworth, Crabbe and Clare, and it grew to great strength in the nineteenth century with the novels of the Brontë sisters and Thomas Hardy. But this was the regional mainly in tension with the metropolitan. Though Hardy wrote approvingly that ‘A certain provincialism of feeling is invaluable. It is of the essence of individuality, and is largely made up of that crude enthusiasm without which no great thoughts are thought, no great deeds done,’ it was in refutation of Matthew Arnold who maintained that the provincial spirit lacked ‘the lucidity of a large and centrally placed intelligence … it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre’.¹ It was Hardy’s Jude the Obscure against Arnold’s dreaming spires of Oxford. In the twentieth century, however, social, political and economic forces all conspired to make the ‘centre’ less self-confident. If London remained at the heart of publishing and reviewing, places like Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and Hull became much more the regional capitals of a still urban, but no longer London-based literary activity. Many of the best English poets came from the regions and maintained a non-metropolitan, or even anti-metropolitan, outlook, as do poets like Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage (b. 1963) today.