Regional Stories and the Environmental Imagination

doi:10.1017/9781009292863.020

Chapter 15 - Regional Stories and the Environmental Imagination

from Part III - People and Places

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023

Sylvan Goldberg

Edited by

Michael J. Collins and

Gavin Jones

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Michael J. Collins: Affiliation:
King's College London
Gavin Jones: Affiliation:
Stanford University

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Summary

Even when valorized for a political imagination that drew attention to the marginalized spaces and communities of a rapidly changing postbellum United States, regionalism (or “local color”) literature was long considered to be merely minor: written from and about sites marginal to the centers of culture and power, primarily by women, and appearing most prominently in the modest form of the short story or sketch. This essay reframes the regionalist short story through a renewed attention to its environmental representation, especially by attending to the genre’s questions of scale: the relation between region, nation, and globe; modernity and its relationship to a preindustrial past; the limitations and constraints of a minor form. Through discussions of Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Murfree, Bret Harte, and others, this essay argues that the regionalist short story’s environmental imagination decenters the human, while also revealing the co-constitution of a region and its literary archive.

Keywords

regionalism ecocriticism Environmental Humanities Anthropocene scale climate feminism queer theory Jewett Freeman

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story , pp. 236 - 250

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292863.020 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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References

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