From the Ground Up

The first chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “From the Ground Up: Thinking about Location and Literature.” It discusses concepts of region in everyday discourse and in scholarship. It reviews past studies of literary regionalism, and tests received opinion against available empirical evidence about the circulation of regional writing. Polarized critical views can be incorporated into an account that attends to both the substantive and the relational aspects of place and regional writing. The notion of the chronotope, originated by Mikhail Bahktin, enables an understanding of the centrality of time in narratives about particular places. The opposition between the country and the city (as analyzed by Raymond Williams), and the powerful racialized notion of civilization, provide necessary groundwork for understanding the form. The chapter ends with an explanation of why the book has been framed as a genre study.

World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far

The fourth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far.” It considers the work of this doubly named author, a comparatively recent addition to the canon of literary regionalism. It offers a sketch of Eaton’s life and works, attending closely to recent research and discussing her place in North American literary history. It argues that the author’s success as “Sui Sin Far” depended on her connection to the global locality “Chinatown,” but also that she claims multiple national literatures and writes herself into a world literature beyond their horizons.

Regionalisms Now

The fifth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “Regionalisms Now.” It mobilizes the analytic categories developed in previous chapters in an examination of place-focused cultural production in several media. Examples are drawn from television, popular romance and mystery novels, and literary fiction. These works are not treated as embodiments of an ideal genre or lineal descendants of local color; the argument is that the concept of region remains relevant for contemporary culture and that narrations of place continue to project temporality. The chapter offers extended readings of the authors Ernest Hebert and Wendell Berry, and posits the parable of the global village as an emerging genre.

Local Knowledge and Book-Learning

The second chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time, titled “Local Knowledge and Book-Learning,” offers a revision of received American literary history. It argues that the figure of the schoolteacher personates the contested connection between the particular place and the world beyond. The one-room schoolhouse, in particular, is a site where provincial and metropolitan or cosmopolitan knowledges meet. These topoi play an important role in local color fiction in the nineteenth century, and persist into later periods. The chapter includes Southern, Midwestern, Appalachian, and New England examples; the difference between African-American and Native American representations proves especially revealing. The chapter also considers the implications of this work for college and university teachers, arguing for acknowledgement of their commonalities with primary and secondary school teachers.

The Unexpected Jewett

The third chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “The Unexpected Jewett.” It analyzes Sarah Orne Jewett’s regionalist project, and argues for seeing religion as central to her work. Her beliefs offer a way of coordinating time and space, and inform her vision of transfiguring friendship. The chapter offers an assessment of the history and current state of Jewett criticism, a reading of the early story “A Late Supper,” and discussion of her writing for children. In terms of the concerns of the book as a whole, the center of Jewett’s world is the New England village, reimagined as a woman-centered, radically Christian democracy.

In the Place of a Conclusion

It is time to turn attention to the nonscalable, not only as objects for description but also as incitements to theory. —ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING, The Mushroom at the End of the World In choosing to write this book, and in all its claims, I make a case for taking regional writing seriously. Story-telling about particular places has been a way of attending to the nearby, the distant, and the horizon, and to the entanglement of place and time. It is not always that; it can be encapsulated and quaint. But it continues to be a vital resource for contemporary creators. My enterprise has been to follow this writing into its most ambitious reaches, to read it with other efforts to understand the puzzles of place-time and generally how the world works—and to articulate what I see, as accessibly as I can....