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Mapping Region in Early American Writing

Edward Watts editor John Funchion editor Keri Holt editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of Georgia Press

Published:15th Mar '18

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Mapping Region in Early American Writing cover

Drawing attention to the geographical and literary diversity of American writers before the Civil War

Focusing on place-specific, local writing published before 1860, this work 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.

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 constan

Demonstrating that the antebellum US sustained a vibrant tradition of regional literature, these essays collectively argue that local writing complicated and/or contended with a federalist narrative of nation building. Throughout, the contributors draw attention to how early American literature was shaped by such local factors as overlapping legal imperatives, methods of crop production, and sustained race prejudice. The essays reveal impressive archival work that frequently unearthed interesting regional issues across a diverse collection of locales.

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ISBN: 9780820353838

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

320 pages