Question

What is meant by the term "local color"?

Answer 1

For example, a banana's local color is yellow, or an orange's local color is orange, or a cherry's is red. An artist will analyze that color and how it changes in different lighting conditions. For example a banana's yellow may start to have more violet in shadow. Understanding or identifying local color is especially helpful when one understand how color will react with various lighting conditions.

Answer 2

What Nali is referring to is local color as it relates to the visual arts. I assume, however, that you are referring to local color as it relates to literature/writing since this is the writing group.

What local color refers to in literary terms is how the writing focuses on a particular region of a state, country, or the world. In local-color writing the author focuses on bringing out the . . . well . . . local color of a particular region, often the region he or she is from since that is what one would know the best. Mark Twain is probably one of the most famous authors that was known for southern regionalism. Another very famous regionalist author is Stephen King who writes the vast majority of his work focused on the New England region of the United States. And there are many others.

Things to note in this type of writing are the use of dialect, character mannerisms, local customs, and the setting in which the action takes place including architecture, geography, and geology. It is interesting to note that local color writing is always fiction. This is because writing non-fiction in this style would come off and un-scholarly or un-professional.