Description
Book SynopsisThe Blackwell Companion to American Regional Literature is the most comprehensive resource yet published for study of this popular field.
- The most inclusive survey yet published of American regional literature.
- Represents a wide variety of theoretical and historical approaches.
- Surveys the literature of specific regions from California to New England and from Alaska to Hawaii.
- Discusses authors and groups who have been important in defining regional American literature.
Trade Review“A
Companion to the Regional Literatures of America is a significant achievement and could prove a powerful tool for those who wish to make considerations of space and place even more central to their disciplines.
” Jeremy Wells, Western American Literature 'In short, Charles L. Crow's volume is a must, an essential purchase.' Reference Reviews
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xiv
Introduction 1
PART I History and Theory of Regionalism in the United States 5
1 Contemporary Regionalism 7
Michael Kowalewski
2 The Cultural Work of American Regionalism 25
Stephanie Foote
3 Letting Go our Grand Obsessions: Notes toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers 42
Annette Kolodny
4 Region and Race: National Identity and the Southern Past 57
Lori Robison
5 Regionalism in the Era of the New Deal 74
Lauren Coats and Nihad M. Farooq
6 Realism and Regionalism 92
Donna Campbell
7 Taking Feminism and Regionalism toward the Third Wave 111
Krista Comer
8 Regionalism and Ecology 129
David Mazel
9 The City as Region 137
James Kyung-Jin Lee
10 Indigenous Peoples and Place 154
P. Jane Hafen
11 Borders, Bodies, and Regions: The United States and the Caribbean 171
Vera M. Kutzinski
PART II Mapping Regions 193
12 New England Literature and Regional Identity 195
Kent C. Ryden
13 The Great Plains 213
Diane D. Quantic
14 Forgotten Frontier: Literature of the Old Northwest 231
Bev Hogue
15 The Old Southwest: Humor, Tall Tales, and the Grotesque 247
Rosemary D. Cox
16 The Plantation School: Dissenters and Countermyths 266
Sarah E. Gardner
17 The Fugitive-Agrarians and the Twentieth-Century Southern Canon 286
Farrell O’Gorman
18 Romanticizing a Different Lost Cause: Regional Identities in Louisiana and the Bayou Country 306
Suzanne Disheroon-Green
19 The Sagebrush School Revived 324
Lawrence I. Berkove
20 Re-envisioning the Big Sky: Regional Identity, Spatial Logics, and the Literature of Montana 344
Susan Kollin
21 Regions of California: Mountains and Deserts 363
Nicolas Witschi
22 Regions of California: The Great Central Valley 379
Charles L. Crow
23 Los Angeles as a Literary Region 397
David Fine
24 North and Northwest: Theorizing the Regional Literatures of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest 412
Susan Kollin
25 Texas and the Great Southwest 432
Mark Busby
26 Hawai’i 458
Brenda Kwon
PART III Some Regionalist Masters 477
27 Bret Harte and the Literary Construction of the American West 479
Gary Scharnhorst
28 Mark Twain: A Man for All Regions 496
Lawrence I. Berkove
29 Willa Cather’s Glittering Regions 513
Robert Thacker
30 “I have seen America emerging”: Mary Austin’s Regionalism 532
Betsy Klimasmith
31 “I have never recovered from the country”: The American West of Wallace Stegner 551
Richard H. Cracroft
Index 572
