Couleur locale

A characteristic feature of Romanticism. Authors appealed to the imagination of their readers by including visual and picturesque details. A concrete sense of time and place was considered essential. Descriptive techniques evolved which tried to emulate the painter's eye for detail. However, the vogue for local colour implied more than using description and the selection of detail in order to evoke a particular setting or period. This approach reflected the repudiation of classicism with its veneration for the timeless and the universal in favour of Romanticism's sense of nationhood, diversity, and the value of cultural difference. Local colour was part of the Romantic writer's attempt to capture a new truth, to render social reality in its complexity, to locate his subject within a broader context. At the same time it allowed the writer to express dissatisfaction with present reality and depict an alternative to conventional morality. Romantic writers were drawn to foreign cultures (Spain, Italy, the Middle East, and North Africa) and to earlier periods (the Middle Ages and the Renaissance). Exoticism often carried an erotic charge, and local colour helped open up a literary space in which violent passions could be displayed.

[Ceri Crossley]