The Calender was well received in its day, and it is still a revelation of what could be done poetically in English after a long period of much mediocrity and provinciality.
Those who wrote in German needed to free themselves from charges of provinciality and from foreign dominance.
In this critical effort, thought Arnold, England lagged behind France and Germany, and the English accordingly remained in a backwater of provinciality and complacency.
This last line of thought Arnold develops in the second essay, "The Literary Influence of Academies," in which he dwells upon "the note of provinciality" in English literature, caused by remoteness from a "centre" of correct knowledge and correct taste.
Painting in the Dutch and English colonies of North America reflected generally the portrait styles of the mother countries, though with a note of provinciality.
New York writer A.J. Liebling belittled its provinciality in a stinging series of magazine articles, collected in the 1952 book Chicago: The Second City.
Yet, even for this purpose, the effects of provinciality can limit their geographic ranges and thus their usefulness.
In America's Coming-of-Age (1915), Letters and Leadership (1918), and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), Brooks scolded the American public and attacked the philistinism, materialism, and provinciality of the Gilded Age.
The problem was pride as much as provinciality.
I know from experience that the great majority of people on this earth live with the same feeling of inauthenticity and Chekhovian provinciality, and that many suffer from an even deeper sense of insufficiency, insecurity, and degradation than I do.
That return to home — whether instinctive or didactic — seems to have been shared by a preponderance of the writers, not necessarily as a retreat into provinciality but as an uncovering of vernacular riches found in unlikely places: a salutary identity politics of the idiolect.
