That is a very interesting reflection. In my view (from Italy), it is a quite common phenomenon among art producers and culture producer as they try to move across the centre/periphery divide.

One strategy for peripheral artists/writers is certainly imitations of the canons emanating from the centre (or even emulation, i.e. become "more royalist than the king": super-refined and even snobbish writing). But another that is equally attested (perhaps more recently) is trying to capitalise on their own peripheral quality – which results in the strategy of selling the exoticism of the periphery itself (bringing the "native voice").

Other classic theorists you might want to consider along with Veblen (whose Theory dates from 1899) are Gabriel Tarde (The Law of Imitation from 1890 and, The Social Logic from 1895, The Social Laws from 1898), Georg Simmel (Fashion, 1904) and Marcel Mauss (The Gift, 1924), as well as, more recently, Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction, 1979). They all contain a wealth of releflections on fashion, imitation, emulation, and social stratification.

My colleague Sebastiano Citroni and I have also been working on understanding "the province" as a broad socio-cultural category of periphery in a recent issue of my journal, lo Squaderno, no.41 – http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/. You might want to have a look at it.

Grazie, collega Andrea Mubi brighenti. I will look at the references that you suggest, especially your journal lo Squaderno. They are close in dates to Veblen and that shows some Zeitgeist or "Spirit of the Times" at work in the so-called "Gilded Age." of the late 19th C. society.

I was just reading again what Veblen has written about acquired "taste" the law of proof of futility as a test of true aesthetic refinement (as opposed to utilitarian production) I sense over and over that this kind of thinking is of great benefit to the almost crushing weight of conformity to the iron laws of upward mobility.

There is a welcome light touch and mock-seriousness by which Veblen sets out the attraction of the manicured lawn for the descendants of nomadic herders of northern climates. Veblen closely reasons that although they are perhaps more genetically attracted to having actual cows frolicking, if cows can be said to "frolic," on these lawns. But in order to show disdain for such useful ruminants, the "dolichocephalic" blonde descendants instead import gazelles or rare type of deer for their grassy acreage.

Gloria

If we look at a broader perspective than books, it is apparent that the US has a particular divide in its art genres at the moment.

The cause is largely socio-political rather than geographic.

For around the last 25 to 30 years, in order to access the literary infrastructure, writers in particular have migrated to the coasts where they have found that a generally democratic, left-wing approach was favoured. Over recent years this trend became quite significant and it is hard for right wing authors to receive anything but vilification and abuse.

Those artists that chose to remain in the largely right wing, republican, central US zones cannot easily access the people or facilities they need to publish so have turned in a completely different direction.

These remainers discovered and have led the self-funded short movie capability that social media outlets such as Vimeo and Youtube and even Amazon offer them.

It is through this new art form that the largely right wing in the US is able to publish its message, you see this in a huge variety of forms, the sub-genres of the moment (apart from news and commentary channels) are science fiction, robot human interface, post-apocalyptic survival and the like.

When you do a little research, you quickly see that the film makers, writers and actors are all from the regions you describe above. Chicago, Detroit and those many cities with large desolated areas where empty buildings and neighbourhoods abound are providing the perfect conditions for these artists to achieve success in their own terms.

Thank you, Colleague Ian. The potential of a new tech is always welcome as an agent of social redistributive power. This shift has not happened as yet but I also hope that the lens of science fiction and indy publsihing can aid in access to audiences.

I would like also to unpack the long held rhetorical tropes of "left" and "right" in terms of what is happening at the moment--these two poles that were very stable from post- WW II to the 1990s seem to be breaking up in some areas. Yet. social stratification seeks to reset its totem pole.

The idea that "the provinces" are more traditionalist is not necessarily true in industrial zones where widely differing ethnic groups are thrown together by the needs of industry. Traditionally a globalist POV was the privilege of the well-off who attended upscale schools at which they met elites form other nations.

In an industrial community, the intercultural mixing also happens among working-class people. East Chicago, IN, for instance had 50 nationalities and about 100 different ethnic churches, synagogues, and mosques in a population of about 35,000 at its peak, now reduced to 29,600. The public schools were integrated racially and ABC TV did a documentary in about 1970 marveling at the social cohesion.

FICTION implications

The work of dumping toxic wastes in these communties goes on because of the Veblen style emulation and avoidance from portrayals of these peoples POV in situ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Chicago,_Indiana

(SEE description of West Calumet housing arsenic-lead emergency)

How might those at this point deal with their lives in fiction and be heard seems to be a helpful question in a time when publishing and film are still highly concentrated.

New rhetorical analysis method:

Reading novels through the lens of solid waste disposal. Using a corpora of texts from the US and UK--all fiction--how is waste managing handled? word freq. from Burkean clusters. How are the green neighborhoods kept sightly in large cities in fiction? A large national grant was awarded to scientists and literary scholars for reading novels through a lens of fuel consumption. This lens seems of equal usefulness.

Mountains of waste are showing up in 21st C. films like Wall-E, Idiocracy, The Isle of Dogs. We can find a prominent theme of solid waste management as far back as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby's original home (his greatest secret) is a little town near the refuse dump between East Egg and West Egg (the posh towns) that Fitzgerald calls "Valley of the Ashes." Might be a title for an essay.

Might find something useful in the work by Teresa Amabile who looks at creativity as a socio-culutral construct. She argues that the socio-cultural environment in which an artist/writer works significantly shapes their product.

This is of course a slightly different angle from that of the publisher who wants to make money and will therefore go for works that are likely to find the largest audience i.e. the lowest common denominator.

Perhaps asking this question from many perspectives may be helpful - the writer, the publisher, the reader, I suspect each would have different ways of connecting with, or reason for rejecting the status quo.

Just a thought.

Dear Colleague Davidson,

Thanks so much! I will look up and apply different angles. Just before I opened this reply, I was thinking about writers' inhibitions. Why bother if nobody wants to read about places like this?

You just added some helpful insights.

Your question, Gloria, puts me in mind of one of the most beautiful, well-written novels I've read in the last 10 years, John Williams' Stoner (1965). A less Veblenesque performance would be hard to find. And, yes, it languished for years in abject neglect. Missouri and the boondocks were not sexy. They still aren't. But Stoner's wife is perfect Veblen material, the cause of much of his suffering (authentic people supposedly shun the Veblen ratchet). Despite geographical obscurity and disdain for fleeting intellectual fashions, the message of this austere novel resonates far and wide, battering at the values of the glitzy East and West coast intelligentsia, serene in its own self-confident perceptions. It speaks to the crisis of intellectual life in academia world-wide, while showing deep empathy for an interesting place way off the beaten Veblenesque track. I enjoyed it so much.

Novelists didn't need to be told about conspicuous consumption and waste and the leisure class by the wonderful Veblen. Certainly he formulated them in a systematic way, but Dickens, Thackeray, Zola, didn't require his orderly exposition to make the point about patterns of wealth.

Thanks, Colleague Wright! Stoner by John Williams is one of those novels I will seek out and read. I do read the mainstream novels, as well. Occasionally, only, because the literary novels these days can be so insular and idea-free*.

* Idea-free in the sense of the H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf rift over whether, as Woolf insisted, ideas are "ephemeral" and have no place in "modern" fiction.

Thus, Woolf put her claim in the 1921 text Modern Fiction (paraphrase) "The sooner literature turns its back on Mr. Wells, the better for literature." I didn't look this quotation up in her text Modern Fiction but the wording is close. In Modern Fiction, Woolf also banished Arnold Bennett, who was, as I recall, one of the Edwardian era's major regional writers with some Veblen-like unflattering things to say of the society of the "Five Towns", the porcelain factory towns joined together as Stoke-on-Trent.

True and thank you for this reply, Colleague Goldensohn. But literary history tends to be the version of the winners. I mentioned to big tussle between H. G. Wells and Virginia Woolf. The Bloomsbury group won. This victorious march of history was so pronounced that when I took Modern (sic) British Literature at Indiana University, H. G. Wells was not "modern" enough and was not included.

Stunned, I realized that this was some specialized use of the term "modern" that did not include writers capable of writing scenes set hundreds of millions of years in the future, the pale beach lit only by a burned out white dwarf of our sun, waves lapping on the ghastly unpopulated expanse. This was a penultimate scene in The Time Machine. Since all humanity had passed, there was no call for lengthy interior monologues a la Woolf and the Moderns.

I began to contextualize The Time Machine, envisioning a late Victorian reading Wells' death-of-our-sun scene (probably not V. Woolf, though) in 1895 under a gas lamp with carriage horses clip-clopping along outside. I felt a cosmic chill akin to the academic deep freeze in our Modern British Fiction course outline.

The only way I cured my cognitive dissonance caused by the strange use of "modern" was to write an essay on the ill-fated Henry James / H. G. Wells friendship many years later. At one point, Henry James was so impressed by Wells' fictional prowess that he pleaded with Wells to allow him to co-author a "Mars tale." James and Wells fell out over issues related to some of Wells' "ideas" in Boon and Virginia Woolf became nasty--she was definitely a James protege.

(in Extrapolation (2006) 47.1 "The Invisible Friends: The Lost Worlds of Henry James and H. G. Wells"

https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2006.47.1.13