PROVINCIALISM
provincialism | prvn()lz()m | n. L18. [f. prec. + -ISM.] 1 A manner of speech, or a word, phrase, or pronunciation, characteristic of a particular province or local area, or of the provinces; a provincial characteristic or variety. L18. (tájszólás; vidéki jelleg) 2 Attachment to one's own province or local area rather than the whole nation or State; desire for provincial autonomy rather than national unity. E19. (lokálpatriotizmus, regionalizmus) 3 Provincial character, speech, manners, fashion, mode of thought, etc., esp. regarded as narrow, restricted, unsophisticated, or uncultured. M19. (vidékiesség) 4 Ecol. & Palaeont. The presence or development of biogeographical provinces. M20. (OED)
provincial | prvn()l | n. & a. ME. [(O)Fr. f. L provincialis, f. provincia: see prec., -AL1.] A n. 1 In pl. The people of Provence. Only in ME. 2 A native or inhabitant of a province. LME. b Hist. A native or inhabitant of any of the British colonies in N. America, esp. one engaged in military service. M18. (tartományi v. gyarmati alattvaló) c In Canada: a member of a provincial police force. M20. 3 Eccl. The ecclesiastical head of a province; the chief of a religious order in a district or province. LME. (tartományi rendfőnök) 4 Eccl. a An ordinance of a provincial synod. Also, a rescript addressed to an ecclesiastical province. E16-M17. b A provincial synod. Chiefly Sc. L16-M17. 5 A person who lives in or comes from the provinces, as opp. to a native or inhabitant of the capital or chief seat of government of a country; an unsophisticated or uncultured person. (vidéki lakos; szűk látókörű) E18. 6 ellipt. A provincial newspaper. L19.
B adj. 1 Of or pertaining to an ecclesiastical province. LME. 2 a Provencal. Only in LME. b Designating the Provins rose; consisting of such roses. E-M17. 3 Of or pertaining to a province of a country, State, or empire, now esp. a province of Canada. LME. b Hist. Of or pertaining to European, esp. British, colonies in N. America. L17. 4 Having the relation of a province to a sovereign State. L16-E18. 5 Of or pertaining to a province or provinces as opp. to the whole nation or State; of or pertaining to the provinces as opp. to the capital or chief seat of government; having the manners, speech, or character, esp. the narrowness of view or interest, associated with or attributed to inhabitants of a province or the provinces; unsophisticated, uncultured. M17. b transf. Of or pertaining to places outside that or those regarded as the national centre(s) for some activity. M19.
5 G. GREENE The Lancashire farces he constructsare genuinely provincial. A. MASSIE The even tenor ofprovincial life. A. N. WILSON The Muscovitesseemed to them provincial and conservative. b C. M. BOWRA Oxford and Cambridge on one side and 'provincial' universities on the other. (OED)
provincial ADJECTIVE 1 provincial rather than national/central government state, regional. 2 provincial newspapers/issues non-national, local, parish pump. 3 live in the city and look down on provincial areas non-metropolitan, non-city, outlying, small-town, rural, country, rustic, backwood, backwater; inf. one-horse, hick. 4 she regards herself as sophisticated and most of her colleagues as provincial unsophisticated, parochial, limited, small-minded, insular, inward-looking, illiberal, narrow, narrow-minded, inflexible, bigoted, prejudiced, intolerant.
Opposites national; urban; sophisticated.
provincial NOUN city people looking down on people they regard as provincials country cousin, rustic, yokel, peasant. (Oxford Thesaurus)
In literature:
Often used in a derogatory sense; opposite of:
national, urban, metropolitan, cultured, advanced, sophisticated.
Douglas Dunn’s definition:
Anything that is local and stays local. (e.g. local news, local gossip, local history – i. e. anything that does not have a universal significance)
Modernism:
Has been described as exclusive and elitist
Masculine, heterosexual, middle-class, protestant, Oxbridge education, metropolitan (with London as its centre in the English-speaking world)
More recently:
Modernist writing has been broadened and questioned
Seen as more inclusive and subversive
First signs of provincialism, in the work of Hardy
Outsiders and incomers (from the provinces, from other classes, from abroad)
T.S. Eliot: America
Joseph Conrad: Poland
Virginia Woolf: woman, bisexual
E.M. Forster: homosexual
D.H. Lawrence: working-class
James Joyce: Catholic
Thomas Hardy: without university education, living in Dorset, in rural England, in the ’provinces’
Modernism as a subversive movement:
Subversion of elitist education and the dominance of metropolitan culture
Celebration of the peripheral, provincial, idiosyncratic, individual, marginal
e.g. Thomas Hardy’s creation of Wessex: partly real country and partly dreamworld
or: James Joyce: saw continuity between the local and the universal, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
’He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written
there: himself, his name and where he was.
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on
the opposite page:
Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.’
Antecedents of such thinking:
In Scotland, 18th century:
Robert Burns: Scotland’s national bard, Poems Written Chiefly in the Scotch Dialect
Patrick Geddes, Edinburgh architect, proposal for an outlook tower and exhibition rooms in Edinburgh (now Camera Obscura in the Royal Mile):
Camera
Edinburgh
Scotland
Europe
Language
The World
Recent attempts at re-definition of the word:
1) provincial v regional: a neutral term
’Provincial’ is a term which is often used slightingly ... but ’regional’ seems to attract no such derogatory usage. This is perhaps because it carries with it none of the hierarchically subordinate implications of ’provincial’. ’Regional suggests a division of a larger unit, but without the larger being necessarily dominant. It is at once a more netural term and a more welcome than ’provincial’, and is generally free from the imputation of narrowness which is often implicit in the use of ’provincial’.
R.P. Draper, ’Introduction’, in R.P. Draper (ed.), The Literature of Region and Nation (LondonMacmillan, 1989), p. 4
2) a term of praise
Now, provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a prig or a fool would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault. A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook or he has not anything at all.
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
Devolving English Literature is intended to stimulate further debate by its emphasis on the way in which the ’provincial’ energies so important to Scottish writing, and the anthropological viewpoint developed by Scottish writers, fed into American writing and into the essentially ’provincial’ movement we know as Modernism. Lastly, through examining the ’provincial’ and demotic energies of Modernism, it becomes possible to see how these continue to energize more recent ’provincial’ and ’colonial’ writers as diverse as Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray, and Derek Walcott, several of whom are usually accepted as being opposed to Modernism rather than indebted to it. Throughout this book the word ’provincial’ often appears in inverted commas; this is to alert the reader to the fact that the term has come to acquire a derogatory meaning, and is often used as a term of cultural imperialism. The chapters which follow make some effort to counter such attitudes, and even, on occasion, to valorize the term ’provincial’.
Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 9
3) local v universal
From the perspective of literature … it’s a commonplace view that you have to be local before you can succeed in being universal. Writing that’s local and stays local will probably be of interest only to readers in that locality. Personally, I feel that to be a serious problem only if an attempt is made to claim universality for works that clearly don’t possess it.
Attila Dósa, A Different Drummer: Douglas Dunn interviewed, in: Poetry Review, Vol. 89 No. 3 (Autumn 1999), p. 31
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