Lexington Books The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism

This highly readable edited collection focuses on the work of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Proulx. Each contributor to this volume explores a different facet of Proulx's striking attention to geography, place, landscape, regional environments, and local economies in her writing. Covering all of her novels and short story collections, scholars from the United States, Canada, and abroad engage in critical analyses of Proulx's new regionalism, use of geographical settings, and themes of displacement and immigration. Taken together, these essays demonstrate Annie Proulx's contribution to new regionalist understandings of place on local, national, and global scales. Readers will come away with a better understanding of Proulx's particular landscapes-particularly those of Wyoming, New England, Texas, and Newfoundland-and the issues surrounding the significance of these regions in contemporary American culture and literature. Review The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, edited by Alex Hunt, analyzes Proulx from many angles.--Western American Literature, Winter 2010 This book is not only a timely intervention in emerging studies of Proulx; it furthermore crosses the sometimes divisive nature of academic disciplines and will be valuable to readers from varied fields such as geography, history and literature.--Great Plains Quarterly This excellent collection of essays edited by Alex Hunt illuminates in new and productive ways Annie Proulx's idiosyncratic and engrossing literary terrain. Collectively, they cover the ground between Novia Scotia and Wyoming that we encounter in Proulx's work, but more importantly, they cross the challenging divides within her geographical imagination between the rough and fragile places and people she conjures, between the realist and hyperrealist way in which she does so, and between the hard rock of economics and history and the ephemeral but powerful drives and desires that can turn geography into a place of the mind and human culture into an effect of place. Demonstrating the centrality of literature in understanding the complexity of region, The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx will be of interest not only to Proulx's readers but also to anyone interested in new regional studies and the study of literature and the environment.--William R. Handley, associate professor of English, University of Southern California Alex Hunt and the contributors he has brought together provide a valuable array of critical perspectives on one of the most significant aspects of the fiction of Annie Proulx, the human relationship to the land. Their volume serves to illuminate many facets of Proulx's construction of the complex, difficult, ironic connections between what people often may expect of the landscapes of North America, and the land itself. They not only offer important insights into all of Proulx's work, but a useful general introduction to current critical approaches to understanding literary representations of our relations to our environment.--Eric H. Patterson, author of On Brokeback Mountain: Meditations about Masculinity, Fear, and Love in the Story and the Film About the Author Alex Hunt is associate professor in the English department at West Texas A&M University.