Mapping Region in Early American Writing - Tapa dura

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EDWARD WATTS is a professor of English at Michigan State University.

KERI HOLT is an associate professor of English and American studies at Utah State University.

JOHN FUNCHION is associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Miami.

HOLLIS ROBBINS is the dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Sonoma State University. She has edited or coedited five books on African American literature, including Penguin’s The Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, and In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on the Bondwoman’s Narrative, both with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and The Selected Works of William Wells Brown, with Paula Garrett.

De la contraportada

Mapping Region in Early American Writing is a collection of essays that study how early American writers thought about the spaces around them. The contributors reconsider the variousroles 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 such groups as African Americans, Welsh Indians, Cherokees, and others alongside their more well-known counterparts in a time when America s landscapes and communities were constantly evolving.

EDWARD WATTS is professor of English at Michigan State University.

KERI HOLT is associate professor of English at Utah State University.

JOHN FUNCHION is associate professor of English and American Studies at the University of Miami.

Cover design: Erin Kirk New

Cover illustration:

Editor photos: Photo courtesy of the editor/ Photo courtesy of the editor/ Photo by Wasif Khan

The University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org