The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism

by Alex Hunt, Elizabeth Abele, Wes Berry, Paul Chafe, Hal Crimmel

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739123942
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	12/16/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	229
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Alex Hunt is associate professor in the English department at West Texas A&M University.

Table of Contents

1 Table of Contents
2 Acknowledgments
Chapter 3 Introduction: The Insistence of Geography in the Writing of Annie Proulx
Part 4 I. Orientations
Chapter 5 1. The Influence of the Annales School on Annie Proulx's Geographical Imagination
Chapter 6 2. Proulx and the Postmodern Hyperreal
Chapter 7 3. Drinking the Elixir of Ownership: Pilgrims and Improvers in the Landscapes of Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole and The Shipping News
Chapter 8 4. Postnational United States Regional Hinterlands: Proulx's Ethnic Working-Class Communities in Accordion Crimes
Part 9 II. Geographies
Chapter 10 5. Born Under a Bad Sign: The Question of Geographical Determinism in the Hardscrabble Northern Badlands of Heart Songs and Other Stories
Chapter 11 6. The Corpse in the Stone Wall: Annie Proulx's Ironic New England
Chapter 12 7. "All the Qualities o' the Isle": The Shipping News as Island Myth
Chapter 13 8. Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Geographical Determinism, Landscape, and Caricature
Chapter 14 9. Westward Proulx: The Resistant Landscape of Close Range: Wyoming Stories and That Old Ace in the Hole
Part 15 III. Directions
Chapter 16 10. Landed Bodies: Geography and Disability in The Shipping News
Chapter 17 11. The Location of Immigration: Itinerant Communities and Cultural Hybridity in Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes
Chapter 18 12. Brokeback Mountain as Progressive Narrative and Cinematic Vision: Landscape, Emotion, and the Denial of Domesticity
Chapter 19 13. Capitalism vs. Localism: Economies of Scale in Annie Proulx's Postcards and That Old Ace in the Hole
Chapter 20 14. The Ecology of Narrative: Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole as Critical Regionalist Fiction
Chapter 21 Afterword: Red Desert: The History of a Place and Annie Proulx as Environmental Historian
22 Bibliography
23 Index
24 Contributors

What People are Saying About This

William R. Handley

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 Nova 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.

Eric H. Patterson

Alex Hunt and the contributors he has brought together provide a valuable array of critical perspectives on one of the most significant aspects of the fiction of Annie Proulx, the human relationship to the land. Their volume serves to illuminate many facets of Proulx's construction of the complex, difficult, ironic connections between what people often may expect of the landscapes of North America, and the land itself. They not only offer important insights into all of Proulx's work, but a useful general introduction to current critical approaches to understanding literary representations of our relations to our environment.

Editorial Reviews

This book is not only a timely intervention in emerging studies of Proulx; it furthermore crosses the sometimes divisive nature of academic disciplines and will be valuable to readers from varied fields such as geography, history and literature.

Great Plains Quarterly

The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, edited by Alex Hunt, analyzes Proulx from many angles.

Winter 2010 Western American 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 Nova 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.

William R. Handley

Alex Hunt and the contributors he has brought together provide a valuable array of critical perspectives on one of the most significant aspects of the fiction of Annie Proulx, the human relationship to the land. Their volume serves to illuminate many facets of Proulx's construction of the complex, difficult, ironic connections between what people often may expect of the landscapes of North America, and the land itself. They not only offer important insights into all of Proulx's work, but a useful general introduction to current critical approaches to understanding literary representations of our relations to our environment.

Eric H. Patterson

The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, edited by Alex Hunt, analyzes Proulx from many angles.

Western American Literature

The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, edited by Alex Hunt, analyzes Proulx from many angles.

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 Nova 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.

Alex Hunt and the contributors he has brought together provide a valuable array of critical perspectives on one of the most significant aspects of the fiction of Annie Proulx, the human relationship to the land. Their volume serves to illuminate many facets of Proulx's construction of the complex, difficult, ironic connections between what people often may expect of the landscapes of North America, and the land itself. They not only offer important insights into all of Proulx's work, but a useful general introduction to current critical approaches to understanding literary representations of our relations to our environment.

This book is not only a timely intervention in emerging studies of Proulx; it furthermore crosses the sometimes divisive nature of academic disciplines and will be valuable to readers from varied fields such as geography, history and literature.

From the Publisher