Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness in Nineteenth Century Britain

This project directs fresh attention to a marker of place and of social identity that is always, by definition, out of fashion: provincialism. Provincialism denotes a place, style, and mode of existence that is away from, but still under the dominion of, a powerful metropolis. Over the course of the nineteenth century in England, for historical reasons this study will examine, the term gained a fresh host of depreciative associations. From indicating an accent or style associated with one of the other three nations of the Union or settler cultures, it became increasingly associated with an inward-looking, complacent, mediocre state of Englishness.

The project contrasts these negative associations of provincialism with the simultaneous rise of an enormously popular type of novel: fictions of English provincial life such as Gaskell's Cranford, Anthony Trollope's Barchester novels and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I aim to explore what this enduringly popular genre - provincial fiction - has to offer as a means of thinking about provincialism as a sense of place, a style, and a world-view. Building on important recent scholarship that emphasizes the global networked nature of Victorian provincial fiction, the project contends that the formal aspects of those works construct an idea of off-centre 'middleness'. This aesthetic of middleness in realist provincial fiction, I suggest, invents a homely, fictive grounding for the new social identity of the middle class, still under-represented in nineteenth-century culture and politics at the time.

Reconsidering provincial fiction and its intertwining with the idea of English provincialism is timely for several reasons. First, the genre played an important role in the emergence of the study of English literature as a discipline from the early twentieth century and the project will tell us more about the relation between ideas of Englishness and the critical history of Eng. Lit. at a time of fresh debates about canonicity, diversity, and class. The aesthetic value of provincial fiction, such as work by Eliot, was a flash point in debates between cosmopolitan critics, Bloomsbury modernists, and those inspired by F.R. Leavis. As significant work by post-colonial scholars has suggested, the discipline of English literature was one made at the margins, rather than the metropolitan centre of Imperial Britain. The project will emphasis the imperial dimension of 'Provincialism at Large' and the reception and circulation of provincial fiction outside the metropolis.

Second, the simultaneous rise of provincial fiction and disparagement of provincialism in English cultural criticism during the nineteenth century represents neglected source for historicising present anti-metropolitan affect and critique, which is often accompanied by talk of vanishing or 'squeezed' middles. A strand of project activity is devoted to exploring the meanings of provincialism for writers and readers based across the diverse region of the West Midlands now. These project activities will coincide with the 2019 bicentenary of George Eliot, resident of Nuneaton and Coventry for her first 30 years, but who wrote her fiction in self-imposed exile in London. The PI will work with a Writer in Residence and the Writing West Midlands writer development agency to draw on project materials in a creative-critical dialogue around writing, locality, and non-metropolitan identities now.

Who might benefit from this research?

1. Practicing writers based across the West Midlands
a) approx. 18 established writers taking short course with Writing West Midlands;
b) children and young people participating in SPARK young writers network (20 groups).
2. Cultural heritage professionals and policy/planning for Coventry, City of Culture 2021.
3. Hospital users and visitors, George Eliot Memorial Hospital.
4. KS3/4 teachers and pupils.
5. Local residents, library users, local historians, Nuneaton area.

How might they benefit?

The project Writer in Residence, PI and Partner, Writing West Midlands writer development agency, will draw on project materials to design a short course exploring writing, place, and the significance of provincial thinking now, provisionally scheduled for 2019. This intensive course for practicing writers, advertised and managed by WWM and led by the PI and WinR at the Birmingham Midlands Institute, seeks to construct deep, sustained pathways to impact, including reflections on professional and practitioner development. Contact will be maintained with attendees across the lifetime of the project via blog postings and responses. The PI and Writer in Residence will conduct follow-up interviews/writing exercises with initial course participants and analyse these as a final project milestone. Building on feedback from short course participants a package will be developed for the 20 SPARK young writers groups co-ordinated by WWM across the Midlands.

A key writer examined in this project is George Eliot, whose bicentenary is in 2019, whose home town, Nuneaton is an area of cultural and economic deprivation, and who lived for some years in Coventry, (City of Culture 2021), which leaves her home there unmarked by a plaque and under threat of demolition. Through a series of collaborative activities with and public talks for the Nuneaton-based George Eliot Fellowship, project research will support the broader agenda of cultural regeneration in the area via: the continuing efforts of the GEF to commemorate Eliot's local heritage, in particular an HLF application to open a visitor centre at Griff House; the ongoing 'Bring George Eliot Home' campaign led by the Coventry Observer. The PI is also a key contributor to an episode focusing on Eliot's England and Nuneaton now in a proposed BBC R4 Eliot season in 2019

Impacts on health and wellbeing will be pursued through the design and voluntary distribution of leaflets containing accessible walking routes, information about Eliot's local heritage, and suitable quotations, to users of Nuneaton's major regional George Eliot Memorial Hospital. The project will collaborate with the George Eliot Fellowship in the design of KS3/4 teaching materials for local schools to direct educational benefit for teachers and secondary pupils. Local talks will enrich and inform library users, local historians, and other residents of the Nuneaton area.