This chapter provides background information about the literary mode known as regionalism and explains what is queer about New England regionalism. It analyzes White-authored New England regionalist fiction from the 1865-1915 period, using Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel Deephaven as its primary example, to argue that White-authored New England regionalism imagines independent, queer lives for White women characters, living outside of the heteronuclear family. The chapter then turns to examine the underacknowledged African-American women’s tradition of New England regionalism, a tradition that reworks conventions of the earlier, White-dominated one. This African-American tradition begins in the nineteenth century and extends well into the twentieth: Harriet Wilson, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Dorothy West, and Ann Petry all limn the contours of New England life for Black women, engaging and claiming an inheritance of defiant, queer New England character while exploring the limitations and violence of that inheritance when understood as only available to White people.

Looking back at the mid-twentieth century, we can assemble a cohort of works that paint a composite portrait of neighborhoods as the industrial city as it reached full maturity, with decline approaching or already under way.In the postwar decades, neighborhood literature shifted in its response to the challenge of representing cities as the postindustrial metropolis, primarily organized not around turning raw materials into finished products but around handling information and providing services, began to emerge around and through the receding industrial city.As the postindustrial city matured in the final decades of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first, neighborhood literature took on the task of mapping it with greater nuance.One city that experienced a postindustrial renaissance in neighborhood stories was Boston; the many movies set there deploy the equipment of genre fantasy to consider what has been gained and lost in the changes that shaped the postindustrial city. They are, in part, about the possibilities opened up by this transformation.