The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

"The center of the world : regional writing and the puzzles of place-time" is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on the fiction of the United States and considers the place of the genre in world literature. Regionalism is usually understood to be a literature bound to the local, but this study explores how regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood or the province, but also the nation, and ultimately the world. Its key premise is that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It analyzes how concepts crystallize across disciplines and in everyday discourse and proposes ways of revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors' work. It demonstrates, for example, the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color and subsequent place-focused writing. Such representations embody the contested relation in modernity between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning. The volume discusses fiction from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ursula Le Guin, as well as romance novels and regional mysteries Cover 1 The Center of the World: Regional writing and the puzzles of place-time 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 PREFACE 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 14 CONTENTS 16 List of FIGURES 18 1: From the Ground Up: Thinking about location and literature 22 What Is a Region? 22 Surveying the Literature 37 The Local Local 46 Telling Time 56 Why Genre? 66 2: Local Knowledge and Book-Learning: Placing the teacher in regional story-telling 69 Beginning: Edward Eggleston, Indiana, and the Nation 72 Turning South: Education and Liberation 85 Richard Malcolm Johnston 85 Charles Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du bois, Constance Fenimore Woolson 87 Education and Conquest: Zitkala-Sa and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin 93 The Topos Persists 98 Jesse Stuart and Frank Mccourt 98 Catherine Marshall and Raymond Kennedy 102 Ernest Gaines 107 Teachers and Learners 112 3: The Unexpected Jewett 118 Turning to the Author 119 Standing Between 123 Understanding “A Late Supper” 130 Double Vision 136 4: World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far 142 A (Possibly Surprising) Biographical Sketch 144 Where Is Chinatown? 152 National Language and Literary Education in “Mrs. Spring Fragrance” and “The Americanizing of Pau Tsu” 160 Racialized “Sentimental Education” and Comparative Literature in “Its Wavering Image” 169 National Words and Literary Worlds 176 5: Regionalisms Now 182 Somewhere in . . . 182 Surveying the Literature, Revisited 193 Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky 198 Ernie Hebert and the Darby Chronicles: Never Back Down 211 Contemporary Fiction and the Global Village 221 In the Place of a Conclusion 239 Endnotes 244 Chapter 2 244 Chapter 3 244 Chapter 4 245 Chapter 5 246 Bibliography 248 Book, Films, and Articles 248 Web-Based Sources 262 Index 266 __The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time__ is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media. This title studies literary regionalism and it shows that one of the ways we imagine the world is through writing and reading about particular places. It explores how writers are shaped by particular places and how their stories shape our understanding of localities and the globe