American experience-more fully gendered, regionalized, coloured,
enriched, and enabled by critical efforts in our own historical present time.

DAVID MARTIN

University of Minnesota

"Regionalist"
Fiction and the
Problem of
Cultural
Knowledge

R E G I o N A L I s M AN D A N T H R o P o L o G Y share deep ties.
"Regionalist" literature, as many now describe it, is not just the expression
of local influences or local affiliations. Rather, because "region" itself
implies a cultural subdivision of some larger realm, regionalist literature
has a comparative dimension. As David Jordan writes, "In examining
borders that define difference, the regionalist author encounters confronta­
tions not only along geographic borders that contain distinct local artefacts,
but also along epistemological borders that define a particular sense of
place, [and) cultural borders that separate a distinct regional community
from the larger society within which it exists" (10). Writing across cultural
as well as topographic boundaries, regionalist literature sounds much like
ethnography. Indeed, as James D. Hart observes, regionalism emphasizes
"basic philosophical or sociological distinctions which the writer often
views as though he were a cultural anthropologist" (632).
This way of understanding regionalist literature-as performing an
ethnographic function through fictional means-promises to give region­
alism new relevance and cogency. If region can be understood "as the
spatial dimension of cultural pluralism" (Steiner and Mondale x), then
regionalism, by modeling a way of writing across cultural divides, speaks to
pressing issues of cultural identity, difference, and heterogeneity. But this

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A SENSE OF

PLACE

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