The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx

This edited collection focuses on Annie Proulx's striking attention to geography, place, landscape, and local environments. Contributors consider Proulx's particular landscapes_particularly those of Wyoming, New England, Texas, and Newfoundland_and the issues surrounding the significance of these regions and regionalism in contemporary culture and literature.

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.

1 Table of Contents
2 Acknowledgments
Chapter 3 Introduction: The Insistence of Geography in the Writing of Annie Proulx
Part 4 I. Orientations
Chapter 5 1. The Influence of theAnnales School on Annie Proulx's Geographical Imagination
Chapter 6 2. Proulx and the Postmodern Hyperreal
Chapter 7 3. Drinking the Elixir of Ownership: Pilgrims and Improvers in the Landscapes of Annie Proulx'sThat Old Ace in the Hole andThe Shipping News
Chapter 8 4. Postnational United States Regional Hinterlands: Proulx's Ethnic Working-Class Communities inAccordion Crimes
Part 9 II. Geographies
Chapter 10 5. Born Under a Bad Sign: The Question of Geographical Determinism in the Hardscrabble Northern Badlands ofHeart Songs and Other Stories
Chapter 11 6. The Corpse in the Stone Wall: Annie Proulx's Ironic New England
Chapter 12 7. "All the Qualities o' the Isle":The Shipping News as Island Myth
Chapter 13 8. Annie Proulx's Wyoming: Geographical Determinism, Landscape, and Caricature
Chapter 14 9. Westward Proulx: The Resistant Landscape ofClose Range: Wyoming Stories andThat Old Ace in the Hole
Part 15 III. Directions
Chapter 16 10. Landed Bodies: Geography and Disability inThe Shipping News
Chapter 17 11. The Location of Immigration: Itinerant Communities and Cultural Hybridity in Annie Proulx'sAccordion Crimes
Chapter 18 12.Brokeback Mountain as Progressive Narrative and Cinematic Vision: Landscape, Emotion, and the Denial of Domesticity
Chapter 19 13. Capitalism vs. Localism: Economies of Scale in Annie Proulx'sPostcards andThat Old Ace in the Hole
Chapter 20 14. The Ecology of Narrative: Annie Proulx'sThat Old Ace in the Hole as Critical Regionalist Fiction
Chapter 21 Afterword:Red Desert: The History of a Place and Annie Proulx as Environmental Historian
22 Bibliography
23 Index
24 Contributors