The Poetics of Appalachian Space

Lanier, Parks, Jr., ed.

Cloth Edition, $27.00s
Cloth ISBN: 0-87049-692-1
Status: Out of Print

Library of Congress No.: LC 90-45244
Copyright Year: 1991
232 pp., Illustrations

Not available for purchase

Description

Shaped by the mountains that identify it, Appalachia has produced a literature that has as much to do with interior—and, by extension, intellectual—space as with exterior or physical space. The fourteen essays in The Poetics of Appalachian Space examine interior spaces in Appalachian writings to uncover their metaphorical, psychological, and symbolic meaning. Using the “poetics of space” created by the French poet and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, the contributors make the region’s literature more accessible by stressing the universality of regional literary imagination. More specifically, these essays show how various Appalachian writers use specific interior spaces to discover universal truths about the interior space of individual human beings.

Applying Bachelard’s ideas to Appalachian literature is a fresh approach, yielding not only new perspectives on the writers but new ways of looking at Appalachian history and society. These essays will enlighten literary scholars as well as sociologists and historians of the region and those teaching Appalachian studies.
To the growing body of criticism on Appalachian literature this collection offers a unique approach to some well-known writers and introduces several lesser-known writers whose work deserves greater recognition. No other book-length critical work applies this phenomenological approach to such as wide range of material. The Poetics of Appalachian Space could well be the springboard for other analyses using Bachelard’s theory.

The Editor Parks Lanier, Jr., is professor of English at Radford University.