American regional theory: Toward a theory of the region in the United States and its roles in the production of American literature and culture (Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison)

As recent decades have seen an increased attentiveness to ideas of space, place, setting, nationality, environment, geography, and landscape in literary and cultural criticism, one of the primary points of convergence for these ideas is in the region. Particularly in the United States, the concept of region cuts across diverse genres and fields while remaining free to re-place entire traditions of criticism into a unique context that offers as much new insight into the existing critiques as into the primary literature and culture themselves. What I call American regional theory consolidates my attempt to articulate a self-reflexive methodological critique that has far-reaching implications for literary and cultural study, emerging from the sometimes vague but stubbornly persistent sense that the “region,” poorly defined but widely, often unconsciously, appropriated, enjoys a certain intrinsic, indissoluble value as a core unit of American cultural thought and critique. My study attempts to articulate and explicate American regional theory as a distinct discourse. Formulating a model of the American region in the context of both history and modern literary and critical traditions, I consider many key national issues, including colonization and slavery, westward expansion, agriculture and industrialization, immigration, religion, race, gender, and class in more specifically regional contexts. While it insists upon the theoretical independence of its regional model from the specific grounding in any single region, my study posits “the South” as its initial and emblematic region from which its major questions emanate. The writings of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison are considered in several contexts: first, in consideration of the body of criticism generated by each figure's work; second, in a more consciously comparative literary tradition in which regional identity may be understood as an important aspect of each writer's literary and cultural inheritance; and third, in a wider space in which regional and American literary genres and canons reflect each figure's work in its overall engagement with American culture at large. My interdisciplinary approach also provides a number of practical models for the considerable potential applications of American regional theory in many diverse fields.