The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx
Rethinking Regionalism
Contributions by Elizabeth Abele, Wes Berry, Paul Chafe, Hal Crimmel, Stéphanie Durrans, Dan Flores, Margaret E. Johnson, Christopher Pullen, Bonnie Roos, Jennifer Denise Ryan, Kent C. Ryden, Christian Hummelsund Voie, O Alan Weltzien, Douglas Werden Edited by Alex Hunt
Publication date:
16 December 2008Length of book:
229 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
241x162mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739123942
This highly readable edited collection focuses on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx. Each contributor to this volume explores a different facet of Proulx's striking attention to geography, place, landscape, regional environments, and local economies in her writing. Covering all of her novels and short story collections, scholars from the United States, Canada, and abroad engage in critical analyses of Proulx's new regionalism, use of geographical settings, and themes of displacement and immigration.
Taken together, these essays demonstrate Annie Proulx's contribution to new regionalist understandings of place on local, national, and global scales. Readers will come away with a better understanding of Proulx's particular landscapes—particularly those of Wyoming, New England, Texas, and Newfoundland—and the issues surrounding the significance of these regions in contemporary American culture and literature.
Taken together, these essays demonstrate Annie Proulx's contribution to new regionalist understandings of place on local, national, and global scales. Readers will come away with a better understanding of Proulx's particular landscapes—particularly those of Wyoming, New England, Texas, and Newfoundland—and the issues surrounding the significance of these regions in contemporary American culture and literature.
This excellent collection of essays edited by Alex Hunt illuminates in new and productive ways Annie Proulx’s idiosyncratic and engrossing literary terrain. Collectively, they cover the ground between Novia Scotia and Wyoming that we encounter in Proulx’s work, but more importantly, they cross the challenging divides within her geographical imagination between the rough and fragile places and people she conjures, between the realist and hyperrealist way in which she does so, and between the hard rock of economics and history and the ephemeral but powerful drives and desires that can turn geography into a place of the mind and human culture into an effect of place. Demonstrating the centrality of literature in understanding the complexity of region, The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx will be of interest not only to Proulx’s readers but also to anyone interested in new regional studies and the study of literature and the environment.