eBook

Mapping Region in Early American Writing

Edward Watts, Keri Holt, John Funchion

2015

Overview

Mapping Region in Early American Writingis a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the various roles regions-imagined politically, economically, racially, and figuratively-played in the formation of American communities, both real and imagined. These texts vary widely: some are canonical, others archival; some literary, others scientific; some polemical, others simply documentary. As a whole, they recreate important mental mappings and cartographies, and they reveal how diverse populations imagined themselves, their communities, and their nation as occupying the American landscape. Focusing on place-specific, local writing published before 1860,Mapping Region in Early American Writingexamines a period often overlooked in studies of regional literature in America. More than simply offering a prehistory of regionalist writing, these essays offer new ways of theorizing and studying regional spaces in the United States as it grew from a union of disparate colonies along the eastern seaboard into an industrialized nation on the verge of overseas empire building. They also seek to amplify lost voices of diverse narratives from minority, frontier, and outsider groups alongside their more well-known counterparts in a time when America's landscapes and communities were constan

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Subject: 1783–1850 / African Americans / American / American history / American literature / Atlantic studies / Christianity / civil law / Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775 / Community life in literature / cosmopolitan / empire / expansionism / Frederick Douglass / Geographical perception in literature / George Washington Cable / History and criticism / Landscapes in literature / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / local / Michigan State University / nationalism / Native Americans / regionalism / Regionalism in literature / Revolutionary period, 1775–1783 / slavery / sovereignty / Space perception in literature / The South / Thomas Jefferson / University of Miami / Utah State University
• ISBN: 0820348228, 9780820348223, 0820348236, 9780820348230, 0820353833, 9780820353838