2. The Higher Provincialism
• - For Josiah Royce, California was not an "afterthought" bu
a prism through which the American Identity could be
viewed as.
• -People had embarked for CA in the 1830s and 1840s
during the Gold Rush and had recorded their experiences
through letters, journals, and diaries which would become
memoirs constituting literature in and of itself. These would
serve as contexts historically by scholars.
• -Literary culture in San Francisco in the mid-1850s -
includes journalism, books, history, fiction.
• -San Francisco would flourish as a Pacific Coast epicenter of
urbanism and artistic creativity.
3. The Higher Provincialism
• -California literature in the 1850s was characterized by
humor, history, and memoir, 1860s - local color, literary
journalism, poetry, 1870s - continuation with emphasis on
nature writing connected to geology - the late 1870s-1880s
say more historical writing as well as promotional
literature, long fiction (for the first time as opposed to a
sketch or short story).
• -Other art forms flourished in California such as imagery -
painters, photographers often depicting history in their
own ways
• -Agriculture - Northern California triumphed with wheat in
the 1870s-1880s and led the nation in wheat production for
sometime until 1890s.
