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The Great Plains has long been fertile ground for literature. The Nature of the Place is a comprehensive study of novels and stories by such Plains writers as Willa Cather, Wright Morris, Mari Sandoz, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Manfred, Wallace Stegner, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. Throughout, Diane Dufva Quantic is aware of the region’s collective social and cultural history—aware of the immensely fruitful clash between that complex history and Plains myth (such as “Garden of the World” and “Great American Desert”). In the vast and changeable Great Plains, as Wright Morris once remarked, “Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion.”
The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation.
"Western writers," says Thomas J. Lyon in his epilogue to Updating the Literary West, "have grown up with the frontier myth but now find themselves in the early stages of creating a new western myth." The editors of the Literary History of the American West (TCU Press, 1987) hoped that the first volume would begin, not conclude, their exploration of the West's literary heritage. Out of this hope comes Updating the Literary West, a comprehensive reference anthology including essays by over one hundred scholars. A selected bibliography is included with each piece. In the ten years since publication of LHAW, western writing has developed a significantly larger presence in the national literary ...
The Great Plains, known for grasslands that stretch to the horizon, is a difficult region to define. Some classify it as the region beginning in the east at the ninety-eighth or one-hundredth meridian. Others identify the eastern boundary with annual precipitation lines, soil composition, or length of the grass. In The Big Empty, leading historian R. Douglas Hurt defines this region using the towns and cities—Denver, Lincoln, and Fort Worth—that made a difference in the history of the environment, politics, and agriculture of the Great Plains. Using the voices of women homesteaders, agrarian socialists, Jewish farmers, Mexican meatpackers, New Dealers, and Native Americans, this book cre...
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David Pichaske has been writing and teaching about midwestern literature for three decades. In Rooted, by paying close attention to text, landscape, and biography, he examines the relationship between place and art. His focus is on seven midwestern authors who came of age toward the close of the twentieth century, their lives and their work grounded in distinct places: Dave Etter in small-town upstate Illinois; Norbert Blei in Door County, Wisconsin; William Kloefkorn in southern Kansas and Nebraska; Bill Holm in Minneota, Minnesota; Linda Hasselstrom in Hermosa, South Dakota; Jim Heynen in Sioux County, Iowa; and Jim Harrison in upper Michigan. The writers' intimate knowledge of place is re...
The wide-ranging essays collected in this volume of Cather Studies examine Willa Cather?s unique artistic relationship to the environment. Under the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism, these essays focus on Cather?s close observations of the natural world and how the environment proves, for most of these contributors, to be more than simply a setting for her characters. While it is certain that Cather?s novels and short stories are deeply grounded in place, literary critics are only now considering how place functions within her narratives and addressing environmental issues through her writing. ø These essays reintroduce us to a Cather who is profoundly identified with the places that shap...
A re-evaluation of regionalism in Canadian and American writing, A Sense of Place provides a comparative approach to the issue within a continental framework. The contributors to this collection-including Frank Davey, Marjorie Pryse, and Jonathan Hart-look at a broad range of writers. They explore regionalism on both sides of the border in light of the central political, cultural, literary, and theoretical debates of our times.
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