Elizabeth spencer's complicated cartographies : reimagining home, the south, and southern ... literary production

This book subjects the works of Elizabeth Spencer, critically acclaimed but canonically marginalized, to a study that reveals their interaction with the southern canon as they question its boundaries and remap the long-established landscapes of southern identity. Elizabeth Spencer has published critically acclaimed fiction for over forty years. Yet in many respects, Spencer's work has existed largely on the margins of the southern canon, whose rigid boundaries cannot easily accommodate her shifting vision of - and relationship to - the South. This book looks at the ways in which Spencer's fiction has evolved in its challenges to these boundaries, questioning conventional notions of home, remapping long-established landscapes of southern identity, and challenging southern literary orthodoxies Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction Backward Glances and Forward Thinking: Reconsidering Elizabeth Spencer....Pages 1-14 “A Sure Terrain”: Spencer’s Mississippi Novels....Pages 15-81 Exploding the Can(n)on: The Light in the Piazza....Pages 83-110 Inhabiting the Unhomely Moment in Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories....Pages 111-149 “Radical” Re-Envisionings of Home: The Night Travellers....Pages 151-173 Back Matter....Pages 175-207