For century America the Civil War and westward expansion created numerous changes in society and politics. American artists turned to realism and regionalism to comment on the new concerns of the time period such as the ongoing struggle of the working class as well as the societal elevation of the middle class. Artists documented these national transformations by creating removed, impartial depictions of everyday life. In order to bring their characters and setting to life to allow their readers to become fully engulfed in their stories, Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Kate Chopin in The Awakening employed regionalism while Henry James depicted real life in real time using realism in his story Daisy Miller: A Study.

Mark Twain and Kate Chopin were experts at creating regionalist works. Regionalism refers to texts that concentrate heavily on specific, unique features of a certain region including dialect, customs, tradition, topography, history, and characters. It focuses on the formal and the informal, analyzing the attitudes characters have towards one another and their community as a whole. The narrator is particularly important in regionalist fiction for he or she serves as a translator, making the region understandable for the reader. In his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's use of regionalism brings the reader right into the heart of the 19th century wild American West. Twain brings to the local to life. From the very beginning of the novel Twain tells his reader, "In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect, the extremist form of the backwoods South-Western dialects; the ordinary "Pike-Country" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last" (Twain, pg. 108). Twain guides his reader, using the vernacular, directly into the scene so you feel as if you are right next to Huck Finn, floating down the Mississippi River, as he dictates the story to you. Lack of grammar, incorrect sentence structure and words that you would never find in the English dictionary compose Huck's language and allow the reader to get a feel for his character as well as the customs of the specific region he comes from. The local color stories he describes throughout the novel give the reader a representation of the region in which he dwells and travels.

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