Several essays survey the critical conversation regarding Midwestern literature, explore its cultural and historical contexts and offer close and comparative reading of key texts in the genre.
Front Cover.
Half Title Page.
Title Page.
Copyright Page.
Contents.
Dedication.
About This Volume.
On Midwestern Literature.
Critical Contexts.
1: Midwestern Literature in Historical and Cultural Context.
2: What is “Middlewestishness”? The Evolution of Midwestern Literary Studies.
3: Complicated Grief, Mourning and Melancholia: Reading the Novel of Godfrey St. Peter's Compounded Losses in Willa Cather's The Professor's House.
4: For Those Non-Midwestern, Midwestern Writers: Richard Powers, Toni Morrison, and the Midwest Topos.
Critical Readings.
5: Patricia Hampl, Minnesota, and The Florist's Daughter: Memoir as History.
6: ‘Your Homeland Is Where You Live and Where You Work’: Challenging Midwestern Pastoral(ism) in Tomás Rivera's … And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.
7: “A Place to Fear and Love:” The Imagined Heartland of David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System.
8: Performing Africa in the American Midwest: Memories of Africa in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Song of Solomon.
9: It's Heaven: Sports Literature and Iowa's Pastoral Image.
10: Big Shoulders, Cat Feet: The Midwestern Dimensions of Carl Sandburg and Chicago Poems.
11: Humor Me, I'm from the Midwest: Mike Perry and the Trope of Poking Fun at Ourselves.
12: “Figures of Transmotion”: Bison Hunt Narratives as Mise en Abyme in the Native Literatures of the American Midwest.
13: In the Heart of the Land: Midwestern Plays and Playwrights.
