Regionalism in American and Canadian Literature

Abstract

A comparative North American approach to regionalism, that is, a comparison of the positioning of the regional in US American and Canadian critical discourses, simultaneously addresses two recent developments in the theoretical discussion of regionalism. In the past, scholarly endeavors in the field had “clustered not only around academic subfields but also around the regions themselves” (Powell 2007, 6) and had tended to limit themselves to examining regionalism in the context of national literatures and cultures. As evidenced by numerous publications, ¹ scholarship on regionalism during the past two decades, by contrast, has attempted to “figure regions and regionalism in far more comparative and multilingual ways” (Comer 2003, 117) and to consider regionalism in transnational, hemispheric, or even global contexts. These paradigmatic shifts in the methodology and scope of regionalist studies in literary and cultural criticism have been accompanied by profound changes in the conceptualizations of regions and, consequently, regionalism and regional writing themselves. According to Wendy J. Katz and Timothy R. Mahoney, the concept of “region” in the United States has moved from “what could be called a nineteenth-century geographical determinism to a twentieth-century modernist ‘sense of place’ regionalism to the even more fluid postmodern notion that region is a dynamic and relative construction” (Katz and Mahoney 2008, xii).