Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture
Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture

Author: Robert Jackson

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-10-10

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780807130629

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Regionalism often evokes provinciality and an affiliation with minor literary genres, but Robert Jackson shows that region is an integral part of American identity, providing grounding for major independent voices. Jackson offers a new critical model of region that contributes to literary and cultural study across a wide range of topics. He addresses American literature since the Civil War with particular attention to Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison. In advancing their own diverse aesthetic and social agendas -- reactionary and progressive, theological and secular, gender-based, race-based, and above all, dissident -- these writers, Jackson argues, articulate some of the most perceptive and innovative expressions of the American region in the literary history of the United States. According to Jackson, the region transcends both rigidly defined spatial categories -- the South of slavery, the North of freedom, the West of unlimited possibility -- and derivative cultural connotations of local color to reveal subtle and powerful insights. He provides a regional reading of Twain's greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a meaningful new interpretation of the work and its place in the American canon. He explores Faulkner's obsession with regional identity and places the Mississippian's work in problematic relation to the Depression-era Nashville Agrarian movement. O'Connor, searching for a critical vocabulary to confront mainstream American literature, religion, and gender, transforms the region from a hothouse of sentimentality into a sharp, deadly weapon in her short fiction. Morrison's brilliant appropriation of region enables her to fashion an aesthetic that is both race-conscious and endowed with revisionist agency; through the region she imagines a new grounding for American identity. Jackson illuminates the importance of rethinking long-established assumptions and demonstrates the vast potential of the region in critical considerations of American literature and culture. Even as he devotes significant attention to realism, modernism, southern literature, and African American literature, he speaks to a wide range of fields in American Cultural studies.

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction
The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction

Author: Derrick R. Spires

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 1510

ISBN-13: 177048826X

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Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. Highlights of Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction • Complete texts of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; and Benito Cereno • In-depth, Contexts sections on such topics as “Nature and the Environment,” “Expansion, Native American Expulsion, and Manifest Destiny,” “Gender and Sexuality,” and “Oratory” • Broader and more extensive coverage of African American oral literature than in competing anthologies • Full author sections in the anthology are devoted to authors such as George Moses Horton, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, José Maria Heredia, Black Hawk, and many others

The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction
The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction

Author: Derrick R. Spires

Publisher: Broadview Press

Published: 2022-04-21

Total Pages: 2556

ISBN-13: 1039302270

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This product contains both The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume A: Beginnings to 1820 and The Broadview Anthology of American Literature Volume B: 1820 to Reconstruction as a single purchase. Covering American literature from its pre-contact Indigenous beginnings through the Reconstruction period, the first two volumes of The Broadview Anthology of American Literature represent a substantial reconceiving of the canon of early American literature. Guided by the latest scholarship in American literary studies, and deeply committed to inclusiveness, social responsibility, and rigorous contextualization, the anthology balances representation of widely agreed-upon major works with an emphasis on American literature’s diversity, variety, breadth, and connections with the rest of the Americas. Highlights of Volumes A & B: Beginnings to Reconstruction • Complete texts of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, The Coquette, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; and Benito Cereno • In-depth, Contexts sections on such topics as “Slavery and Resistance,” “Print Culture and Popular Literature,” “Expansion, Native American Expulsion, and Manifest Destiny,” and “Gender and Sexuality” • Broader and more extensive coverage of Indigenous oral and visual literature and African American oral literature than in competing anthologies • Full author sections in the anthology are devoted to authors such as Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Briton Hammon, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, José Maria Heredia, Black Hawk, and many others