Description

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.

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

Product details

Published Dec 16 2008
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 229
ISBN 9780739123942
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 241 x 162 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Alex Hunt

Contributor

Elizabeth Abele

Contributor

Wes Berry

Contributor

Paul Chafe

Contributor

Hal Crimmel

Contributor

Dan Flores

Contributor

Bonnie Roos

Contributor

Kent C. Ryden

Contributor

O Alan Weltzien

Contributor

Douglas Werden

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