Local color or regional literature is fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. Influenced by
Southwestern and Down East humor, between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century this mode of writing became dominant in American literature. According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description" (439). Its weaknesses may include nostalgia or sentimentality. Its customary form is the sketch or short story, although Hamlin Garland argued for the novel of local color.
Regional literature incorporates the broader concept of sectional differences, although Judith
Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have argued convincingly that the distinguishing characteristic that separates "local color" writers from "regional" writers is instead the exploitation of and condescension toward their subjects that the local color writers demonstrate.
One definition of the difference between realism and local color is Eric Sundquist's: "Economic or political power can itself be seen to be definitive of a realist aesthetic, in that those in power (say, white urban males) have been more often judged 'realists,' while those removed from the seats of power (say, Midwesterners, blacks, immigrants, or women) have been categorized as regionalists." See also the definition from the Encyclopedia of Southern Literature.
Many critics, including Amy Kaplan ("Nation, Region, and Empire" in the Columbia Literary History of the United States ) and Richard Brodhead ( Cultures of Letters ), have argued that this literary movement contributed to the reunification of the country after the Civil War and to the building of national identity toward the end of the nineteenth century. According to Brodhead, "regionalism's representation of vernacular cultures as enclaves of tradition insulated from larger cultural contact is palpably a fiction . . . its public function was not just to mourn lost cultures but to purvey a certain story of contemporary cultures and of the relations among them" (121). In chronicling the nation's stories about its regions and mythical origins, local color fiction through its presence--and, later, its absence--contributed to the narrative of unified nationhood that late nineteenth-century America sought to construct.
A variation of this genre is the "plantation tradition" fiction of Thomas Nelson Page and others.
Setting: The emphasis is frequently on nature and the limitations it imposes; settings are frequently remote and inaccessible. The setting is integral to the story and may sometimes become a character in itself.
Characters : Local color stories tend to be concerned with the character of the district or region rather than with the individual: characters may become character types, sometimes quaint or stereotypical. The characters are marked by their adherence to the old ways, by dialect, and by particular personality traits central to the region. In women's local color fiction, the heroines are often unmarried women or young girls.
Narrator : The narrator is typically an educated observer from the world beyond who learns something from the characters while preserving a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes ironic distance from them. The narrator serves as mediator between the rural folk of the tale and the urban audience to whom the tale is directed.
Plots.
It has been said that "nothing happens" in local color stories by women authors, and often very little does happen. Stories may include lots of storytelling and revolve around the community and its rituals.

Themes: Many local color stories share an antipathy to change and a certain degree of nostalgia for an always-past golden age. A celebration of community and acceptance in the face of adversity characterizes women's local color fiction. Thematic tension or conflict between urban ways and old-fashioned rural values is often symbolized by the intrusion of an outsider or interloper who seeks something from the community.
Techniques
New England
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Rose Terry Cooke
Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman
Sarah Orne Jewett
Rowland Robinson
Philander Deming
Alice Cary
Alice Brown (works)
Celia Thaxter
Celia Thaxter in her
Garden , by Childe
Hassam
South
Picture courtesy of Carole Gerten-
Jackson
Mary N. Murfree (Charles
Egbert Craddock)

In the Tennessee
Mountains (1885)
Kate Chopin
Grace King
George Washington Cable
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Ruth McEnery Stuart (1856-
1917)

In Simpkinsville
(1897)(new URL)
Constance Fenimore
Woolson
Charles W. Chesnutt,
Thomas Nelson Page
Joel Chandler Harris
James Lane Allen.
Midwest
Great Plains
Edward Eggleston
E.W. Howe
Hamlin Garland
John Hay
James Whitcomb Riley
Zona Gale
Gertrude Simmons Bonnin
(Zitkala-Sa).
Bret Harte
West
Mark Twain
Mary Austin
Use of dialect to establish credibility and authenticity of regional characters.
Use of detailed description, especially of small, seemingly insignificant details central to an understanding of the region.
Frequent use of a frame story in which the narrator hears some tale of the region.
Prominent African-American writers such as Charles W. Chesnutt and Frances E.
W. Harper demythologize and satirize portions of the "plantation tradition" in their works.. See especially Chesnutt's "The Goophered Grapevine," the first story published by an African
American in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine (1887), and the stories in his The Conjure Woman
(1899).