Literary Regionalism Research Articles

List jako świadectwo życia kulturalno-naukowego na przykładzie spuścizny rękopiśmiennej ks. Jana Kudery

Father Jan Kudera, together with Father Emil Szramek and Konstanty Prus, belonged to the first generation of researchers of the Silesian literary regionalism. This paper presents the results of an analysis the correspondence of Fr. Jan Kudera, kept at the Archdiocesan Archives in Katowice. The analysed documents come from 9 fonds of the legacy bearing reference numbers from ZS 515 to ZS 523. The research of a historical and literary character was conducted mainly through content analysis. The letter was treated as a document and at the same time an autonomous statement. Correspondence from the legacy of the priest can be a valuable and unique source of information on cultural and scientific life in Silesia in the years 1922–1939 and about Kudera itself.

As die Cape Flats Kon Praat: Locality and the Literature of Precarious Living

This paper discusses the importance of Brian Fredericks’s short story collection, As die Cape Flats Kon Praat (If the Cape Flats Could Speak), published in 2020. The nine stories in the collection present different narratives of male characters and their experiences on the living areas outside Cape Town collectively known as the Cape Flats. These areas are synonymous with poverty and violence, identifiers that simultaneously suggest urgent attention but also reductive stereotyping. Two of the stories in the collection are examined here for information they provide about the intersections between gang culture and family relations, as well as how both are shaped by senses of place. How geographical space (here, space that was engineered during apartheid) influences and is influenced by the movements and actions of people is a point of theoretical interest in this article. This is supported by a short study of the workings of Cape Flats gangs and the transactional role played by violence. Fredericks’s collection joins a growing and necessary library of redress that reflects the value of Cape Flats narratives as essential to South African literature. That this collection includes the language of Afrikaaps, which is undergoing a similar re-evaluation in recent knowledge production, underscores the relevance of newer output that sheds light on the social codes, cultural grammars, and moral economies of a hitherto underrepresented literary region.

O položaju organske neizgrađene prirode u poetici i ideologiji istočnojadranskog futurizma

The article offers an overview of lesser-known aspects of the Eastern Adriatic futuristic avant-garde in a broader sense: both the futuristic movement itself and the phenomena that relied on it in conventional interpretations. Selected episodes relate to the examination of the futuristic relationship to the organic unbuilt nature. Emphasis is placed on the comparative image of this multicultural and multilingual literary region, beyond national historiographical conventions.

Gioakim Dang Duc Tuan - Typical author of Binh Dinh Sino-Nom literature

Binh Dinh is one of the important cultural and literary cradles contributing to the creation of the South Central cultural region, which is the premise to promote the strong development of the South-Central literary region in the road after 1623. The history of Binh Dinh literature on the journey of advocacy always has a continuation and continuity among different literary departments. In that schedule, the literary department is institutionalised through specialised methods from aesthetic ideals to artistic methods, which stand out as the Sino-Nom literary issues, so it is also known as Sino-Nom literature. Binh Dinh Sino-Nom literature in the process of campaigning has been associated with typical authors such as Dao Duy Tu, Dang Duc Sieu, Nguyen Dieu, Dao Tan, Dao Phan Duan..., and Priest Gioakim Dang Duc Tuan is prominent among them. He is one of the important authors of Binh Dinh Catholic Sino-Nom literature and has made great contributions to the history of Sino-Nom literature in Vietnam.

New Orleans Coffee in The Awakening: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

New Orleans Coffee in <i>The Awakening</i>: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

Interview with Jon Lauck

Interview with Jon Lauck

Breece D’J Pancake, peripheral modernist

In this essay I discuss the short stories of the Appalachian and West Virginian writer Breece D’J Pancake (1952-1979) in order to reflect on the ways in which the experience of peripherality comes to be registered in literature. Taking the cue from recent articulations of world literature as the literature of the capitalist world system, I argue that Pancake is a peripheral modernist: the formal oscillation between a realism traditionally associated with regionalist writing and “irrealist” elements stands as a mark of his peripherality. Both the class focus of Pancake's stories and their broad environmental theme may be regarded as symptoms of the region’s structural position within the processes of capital accumulation. I maintain that there is a utopian impulse permeating Pancake’s fiction. It can be located in Pancake’s descriptions of the environment and the temporal disjunctions present in his stories. Keywords: Breece D’J Pancake, literary regionalism, capitalism, peripherality, modernism, utopia

"Allmählich kriegt man vor Kafkas Vater, vor Möbeln und selbst vor Felice Respekt" : Hermann Kafkas Herkunft und deren Präsenz im Werk des Sohnes

The literary region of South Bohemia is prominently represented on the Atlas of World Literature by Adalbert Stifter – some may also remember Hašek's "Budweiser Anabasis", an important element of Schwejk's wanderings into war. However, one of the most notorious father-figures in world literature, Hermann Kafka, comes from a small town in southern Bohemia, Wosek. This article would like to proceed in two directions. First, to reconstruct the world of origin of this father, a socialisation that in many ways also remained imprinted in the Kafka family. Hardness against oneself, the will to rise, physical presence and potency were qualities that Hermann Kafka acquired in this milieu and permanently "exemplified" to his son. The son repeatedly invoked this vitality of origin in many texts, not least in the "Brief an den Vater". On the other hand, the article will show the extent to which this Wosek world was incorporated into Franz Kafka's texts, for example, the extent to which the atmosphere of the village in the "Castle" novel reflects the concrete Wosek conveyed by the father, however alienated. This part is intended as a suggestion for further analyses.

Contesting Homogeneity: Stereotypes and Heteronormativity in Aruni Kashyap’s His Father’s Disease

Abstract This article analyses Aruni Kashyap’s short story collection His Father’s Disease. Kashyap challenges hegemonic structures through an emerging writing area tentatively classified as ‘Anglophone fiction from Northeast India’. By engaging with Foucault’s reading of Power/Knowledge this article examines the disciplining of literary regionalism (Anglophone literature from Northeast India), territory and sexuality encapsulated in Kashyap’s exposition of heteronormative societies across cultures. Through the stories Kashyap weaves a dialogic space within the narrative world that challenges various forms of stereotypes relating to regional representation in literary works as well as regional identity and sexuality prevailing in the contemporary world’s existing social and literaryscape. Therefore, it becomes pertinent to observe how Kashyap’s text becomes a site of contention where on one hand the stereotype is accommodated within the power structure, hence controlled and regulated by various agencies, and on the other hand the same knowledge is appropriated by the author as a counter-narrative/reverse-discourse.

‘Where tide and river meet’: the estuarial imaginaries of Sarah Orne Jewett, H.D., and Louise Bogan

ABSTRACT This article is situated in the brackish intersections between river studies and oceanic studies. Comparing the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Louise Bogan, I argue these three authors engage a ‘trialectic relationship’, to borrow Ling Zhang’s term, between river, sea, and nation. This mimics the form of an estuary, a layered site for negotiating nationhood, industrialisation, and placelessness, that, for these authors, flows from the local to the global, but always returns to estuarial flow. For Jewett, famous for her American literary regionalism, I look at the globally/nationally expansive imaginary of her short story, ‘River Driftwood’, with its local context of river/harbour and historical moment of shifting maritime industry alongside river technology. Next, the modernist poet H.D.’s ‘Leda’ – with its abstract layering of the same Maine harbours, the industrial Lehigh river, and a palimpsested mythological place – forms an estuary whose resistance of Zeus (the industrial) is rooted in its natural movements. Finally, working from theories of planetarity and hydrology, I suggest that Bogan in her poem ‘Night’, localises planetary systems within the immediate movement of tidal mixtures. Thus, these literary estuaries emerge as sites of layered movement, rather than singular points of connection or separation; they produce, like river and ocean flowing together, an estuarial imaginary.

Regional Literary models and the Contemporary Canon of Croatian Children’s Literature

When balancing between ideologies and aesthetic values, literary canon, despite it primarily signifying a specific list/rule, is understood to be an “imaginary totality” (Guillory 1993) and a permanently active and socially conditioned process (Bourdieu 1993). That is the direction of discussing and examining the canon of Croatian children’s literature taken by Croatian theorists who focus on the social, historical and ideological context as well as changes reflected on the system of desirable social values, and consequently on shaping the canon of children’s literature. Croatian children’s literature is an ideal example of it due to its existence within Yugoslav children’s literature. On the other hand, very little is said about the regional characteristics of Croatian children’s canon as a cultural capital constructed within the new circumstances of the nineties. These characteristics were created by “reshaping the canonical tables” (Težak and Marušić 2015), which also secured a more significant position of regional poetics and politics. Examining the concept of literary regionalism, Brešić (2004) finds merit for the existence of separate literary poetics with respect to geographical space and discusses the characteristics of Slavonian regional literature as a model of autonomous structure from the perspective of history and theory of literature. In doing so, he considers space a crucial category which conditioned the dispersive character of Croatian literature. The concept of literary regionalism interpreted in such a way allows for a discussion on poetic features of regional literary texts unique by their historical, cultural and linguistic journey determined by space. Therefore, starting from the “identity of a place” (Brešić 2004) as a fusion of space and culture, the paper analyses regional topics within the canonical body of work based on anthologies and overviews of Croatian children’s literature. It also establishes their affiliation to a regional literary model, defines the characteristics of a local entity (Sablić-Tomić and Rem 2003), whereby reading the regional within the canon contributes to asserting canonical status while pushing the boundaries of defining the canon.

REGIONALNE PISARSTWO KOBIET W LATACH 1919–1939. W STRONĘ GEOPOETYKI I KOMPARATYSTYKI (WSTĘPNE ROZPOZNANIA)

Literary texts, and especially those that are aesthetically mediocre or even pretentious, have been an important platform for political expression in the interwar Europe. A significant number of Polish (and foreign) women writers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Wanda Milaszewska, Zofia Kossak, Pola Gojawiczynska, and Halina Krahelska – to mention only a few representative names – wrote many personal and fictional narratives about female experience, regional culture, and collective identity. However, while male writers’ contribution to literary regionalism has been well documented, the contribution of female authors to the development of regional writing and regional identities has not been explored as thoroughly as it ought to be. This article proposes a new approach to analyzing regional women’s writing by drawing particularly on studies of women’s literature, comparative literature, and geopoetics. It poses a number of research questions whose aim is to spark a debate in this area.

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965. Iowa and the Midwest Experience. By Jon K. Lauck

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965. Iowa and the Midwest Experience. By Jon K. Lauck

‘Is Boggabilla where Bill takes a dump?’ Writing an Australian literary regionalism: Stories and poetry published in Idiom 23 literary magazine, 2016–2018

This article aims to explore the representation of what I argue identifies an Australian literary regionalism in stories and poetry published in Idiom 23, Central Queensland University’s literary magazine, over the past three issues, 2016–2018. As editor of Idiom 23 during this time, I have detected in the contemporary writing of regional contributors a heightening interest in expressing a unique sense of place and history through literary elements including, but not limited to, an emphasis on local colour and characterisation, rurality and regional settings, and personal stories of time and place, as well as an idiomatic interest in literary tropes accentuating colloquialisms, regional traditions, dialogic ‘play’, personal and familial histories, Indigenous identity, and distinctive ways of mapping, representing, articulating, and celebrating cultural belonging. Exploring how contributions to Central Queensland University’s Idiom 23 literary magazine over the past three issues, 2016–2018, construct a sense of regionalism and regional identity offers rich potential to not only identify the narratives, stories, or voices ‘naturally’ arising in regional writing practices, but also how perceptions of regionality impact on the ways regional writing is itself expressed through a unique form of Australian literary regionalism.

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920–1965

The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow by Ashley Andrews Lear

Reviewed by: The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow by Ashley Andrews Lear Linda Kornasky THE REMARKABLE KINSHIP OF MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS AND ELLEN GLASGOW, by Ashley Andrews Lear. Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2018. 266 pp. $29.95 cloth. In her well-researched study, The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow, Ashley Andrews Lear thoroughly analyzes the extraordinary friendship and professional relationship between two distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning novelists: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow. Lear initially emphasizes the striking differences between the two writers in age, career position, and most importantly the setting-bound genres to which their critical reputations have been firmly linked—farm novels set in the remote, ecologically unique Florida scrub country and novels of manners set in urban Richmond, Virginia, respectively. As Lear states in her introductory observations, "the two authors seem to have been cut from different cloth" (p. 1). However, Lear soon turns to shared aspects of their lives and art: common experiences of physical ailments, such as cardiovascular problems; social interests, such as their storied success in hosting gourmet dinner parties, celebrated in Rawlings's cookbook Cross Creek Cookery (1942), and house guests for extended visits at their iconic homes; and nature-centric literary aesthetics, such as their shared use of tree symbolism (p. 36). The seven body chapters can be read as separate essays on the intersections between the two writers, and for this reason, there is some overlap in the chapters' subject matter, stemming from the non-chronological organization of the study. Similar to Rawlings and Glasgow's freewheeling intimate conversations and correspondence during the last seven years of the latter's life (1938-45), which reveals the interwoven strands of memory and imagination in their works, Lear does not restrict her analysis to a [End Page 241] linear history. For example, chapters one and two, "A Letter and a Dream" and "A Certain Measure of Achievement," both expansively ponder the significance of crucial letters exchanged between Rawlings and Glasgow. In chapter one, Lear initiates her analysis with a careful reading of a letter written by Rawlings to Glasgow that is well known to critics of both writers. Lear highlights the significance of this moving letter in which Rawlings expresses the unexpectedly strong bond she felt with her mentor by sharing details of a haunting dream that she had following their first meeting at Glasgow's home in Richmond. Chapter two builds off of their friendship's inaugural letter, which Glasgow had written to Rawlings to praise and congratulate Rawlings for the success of The Yearling (1938), inviting the younger writer to meet in person. The chapters following the first two explore an array of meanings stemming from their profound, correspondence-born connection, which prompted Rawlings to undertake a never completed official biography of Glasgow after her mentor's death in 1945. These chapters address important areas of comparison—and some contrast—between the two writers in the development of their creativity and writing techniques. Chapter three addresses their relationships with family members, particularly siblings—each had a complex relationship with a brother named, coincidentally, Arthur—and the difficulties of parents whose marriages were troubled, compounded by the early death of the favored parent (Rawlings's father and Glasgow's mother). Chapter four addresses the similar issues that motivated each to civic engagement: Rawlings's environmental advocacy to conserve the unique flora and fauna of the Florida scrub country and Glasgow's commitment to the era's growing animal rights movement and her leadership roles in the Richmond Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which would inherit her estate. Chapter five is an exploration of the two writers' conflicted attitudes toward literary regionalism, while chapter six discusses how their personal experiences of disappointment in romantic relationships prompted both to take unsentimental approaches to romantic love in their novels. Finally, chapter seven deals with their similarly mixed but often constructive literary legacies in regard to social justice issues, particularly racism and class inequalities. In her concluding "Afterword," Lear contends that Glasgow and Rawlings's unique bond is an accomplishment to be honored—an accomplishment that critics of their work had overlooked prior...

The Reflection of “Capital — Province” Relations in Contemporary Ural Poetry

This article considers current issues of literary regionalism with reference to the analysis of the fourth volume of the Anthology of Ural Poetry (2018) compared with the third volume (2011) and the Encyclopaedia of the Ural Poetry School (2013). The subject of the research is the reflection of participants in the Ural poetic movement over the status of a provincial poet. The methodological basis of the article, in addition to the historical-literary principle, is the theory of the pragmatics of a fiction text. The Ural poetic movement is considered in the context of the concepts of local text, regional literature, provincial, local, and peripheral culture. The change in the historical and cultural circumstances over the past decades in the country and in the Urals in particular has caused a transformation of traditional ideas about the uniqueness of a poetic personality. The Ural Poetry School as a project of V. Kalpidi shows the effectiveness of collective strategies in organising and presenting poetry. The goal of the anthologies issued every seven years is not only to fix the current state of Ural poetry but also to comprehend its development and set the directions of further progression. The consideration of the poetic and analytical texts included in the fourth volume of the anthology of Ural poetry convinces us of the sequence of actions aimed at turning Ural poetry into a “poster project” for all Russian poetry. To determine the essence of the Ural Poetry School phenomenon, the author of the article refers to the theory of actor-network interactions by Bruno Latour. According to Latour, it is not subjects that define movement (performatives), but movement forms subjects. The Ural Poetry School can be viewed as actor-networked education, voluntary and dynamic interaction, and common meaning is given to common gestures and practices by the efforts of Kulturtragers — overcoming the dualism of the capital and the province in the participants’ self-awareness.

Oralidades em anotações de cordel: a produção de diários poéticos em aulas de escritura acadêmica

This text aims to present contributions of poetic production of cordel literature in the development of reading and writing during curricular discipline of academic writing in stricto sensu level of Human Sciences, Education Area. Conceptualizations and contributions of tradition, orality and literary regionalism were approached as basis for the understanding of the dialogical act of research, relating the transversality of poetic and academic writing as a learning possibility and as theoretical and methodological approach for recording, evaluating and understanding the contents/discussions of scientific communication. The prosaic of the academy intertwined with the poetics of the Northeastern tradition emerges as a way of motivating text production, in the interlace of delight and form, as pedagogical strategy of reading and writing. The writing of cordels, during the experiences of the academic curriculum, stimulated learning to read and write in the scientific academy. Thus, it was concluded that the poetic agent of the cordel extrapolates the pleasure of reading, allows necessary understanding of the scientific writing, foments reading culture and offers possibilities to do it in alternation of readings and writings. Experience reports of writing cordels in this study point the need of considering this regional poetic literary resource useful for academic writing.

Idiorrhythmic Regionality, or How to Live Together in Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs

The story of “poor Joanna” in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs exemplifies “idiorrhythmic regionality”: a conception of regionalism as a transcultural, transnational, and irreducibly cosmopolitan relationality. It juxtaposes fictional Shell-heap Island with its real-life model, the Whaleback shell heap—a large deposit of oyster and clam shells created by many generations of Native American peoples. The Whaleback heap preserves intact the matter lodged within it—including vestiges of natural, prehistoric, and Native American life accumulated over a millennium. In this way, it figures as a unique archival mechanism that assembles in a single place seemingly incongruous temporalities and forms of life whose spatiotemporal coexistence disrupts evolutionary distinction, ontological priority, and historical linearity. Embedding Joanna in the scientific debates and corporate decisions surrounding the Whaleback’s constitution and destruction reformulates traditional definitions of literary regionalism, and postulates idiorrhythmic relationality as a novel theory of region.

Literary Regionalism and Mark Twain's Telephone

Abstract Focusing on the work of Mark Twain, this article considers the convergence of two late nineteenth-century voice technologies: dialect writing and the telephone. The racial and rural dialects transcribed by regionalist fiction offered mostly white, urban, middle-class readers entertaining encounters with “other” voices from a safe remove. The rhetoric surrounding the telephone's development promised that it would one day fulfill the same function in real time. But “the ideological power of dialect literature” (Gavin Jones) reinforced stereotypes rather than conveying geographically or socially distant voices to readers. Similarly, despite early fantasies of cross-cultural communication, the telephone facilitated socially insular conversation as it became systematized. Twain, however, emphasized the numerous miscommunications of the emergent telephone. Especially in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), he debunked the myth of cultural contact promulgated by dialect writing and telephony by making readers question their ears.