The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx Rethinking Regionalism

by Hunt, Alex; Abele, Elizabeth; Berry, Wes; Chafe, Paul; Crimmel, Hal; Durrans, Stéphanie; Flores, Dan; Johnson, Margaret E.; Pullen, Christopher; Roos, Bonnie; Ryan, Jennifer Denise; Ryden, Kent C.; Voie, Christian Hummelsund; Weltzien, O Alan; Werden, Dou

• ISBN13: 9780739123959
• ISBN10: 0739123955
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-23
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Alex Hunt is associate professor in the English department at West Texas AM University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction: The Insistence of Geography in the Writing of Annie Proulx	p. 1
Orientations
The Influence of the Annales School on Annie Proulx's Geographical Imagination	p. 11
Proulx and the Postmodern Hyperreal	p. 25
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	p. 39
Postnational United States Regional Hinterlands: Proulx's Ethnic Working-Class Communities in Accordion Crimes	p. 51
Geographies
Born Under a Bad Sign: The Question of Geographical Determinism in the Hardscrabble Northern Borderlands of Heart Songs and Other Stories	p. 63
The Corpse in the Stone Wall: Annie Proulx's Ironic New England	p. 73
"All the qualities o' th' isle": The Shipping News as Island Myth	p. 87
Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Geographical Determinism, Landscape, and Caricature	p. 99
Westward Proulx: The Resistant Landscapes of Close Range: Wyoming Stories and That Old Ace in the Hole	p. 113
Directions
Landed Bodies: Geography and Disability in The Shipping News	p. 127
The Location of Immigration: Itinerant Communities and Cultural Hybridity in Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes	p. 141
Brokeback Mountain as Progressive Narrative and Cinematic Vision: Landscape, Emotion, and the Denial of Domesticity	p. 155
Capitalism vs. Localism: Economies of Scale in Annie Proulx's Postcards and That Old Ace in the Hole	p. 169
The Ecology of Narrative: Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole as Critical Regionalist Fiction	p. 183
Afterword
Red Desert: The History of a Place, and Annie Proulx as Environmental Historian	p. 197
Bibliography	p. 201
Index	p. 211
Contributors	p. 215
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