Mapping Region in Early American Writing

Erscheinungsjahr 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8203-5383-8
Verlag: University of Georgia Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 525 g

Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions—imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively—played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. These texts vary widely: some are canonical, others archival; some literary, others scientific; some polemical, others simply documentary. As a whole, they recreate important mental mappings and cartographies, and they reveal how diverse populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their nation as occupying the American landscape.

Focusing on place-specific, local writing published before 1860, Mapping Region in Early American Writing examines a period often overlooked in studies of regional literature in America. More than simply offering a prehistory of regionalist writing, these essays offer new ways of theorizing and studying regional spaces in the United States as it grew from a union of disparate colonies along the eastern seaboard into an industrialized nation on the verge of overseas empire building. They also seek to amplify lost voices of diverse narratives from minority, frontier, and outsider groups alongside their more well-known counterparts in a time when America’s landscapes and communities were constant.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Watts, Edward

Holt, Keri

Funchion, John

Über Autor(innen)

Edward Watts is professor of English at Michigan State University.

Keri Holt is assistant professor of English at Utah State University.

John Funchion is associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Miami.