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.
General
Imprint: |
Louisiana State University Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Series: |
Southern Literary Studies |
Release date: |
October 2005 |
First published: |
May 2001 |
Authors: |
Robert Jackson
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 19mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Hardcover
|
Pages: |
172 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8071-3062-9 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8071-3062-1 |
Barcode: |
9780807130629 |
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