| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation. By Robert Jackson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. xii, 174 pp. $44.95, ISBN 0-8071-3062-1.)

In Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture, Robert Jackson pursues an admirable goal: formulating "the region"—that evocative but rather elusive entity—in American culture. More exactly, Jackson proposes an "American regional theory" through which to read American literature (p. 19). He sees the American region as negotiating between poles of empire and republicanism and as having to grapple with historical problems of slavery and Native American dispossession. He posits that, where appeals to region in European cultures can tend toward reactionary uses, region in an American context can afford writers a potentially dissident space in which they can refocus or critique national issues. Building his model in the introduction from interesting, if rather quirky, starting points—consideration of an 1856 statement in the Richmond Enquirer that "Freedom is not possible without slavery" and a reading of a St. Louis–centric map of the United States—Jackson promises to elucidate his theory through a mainly southern focus, with chapters on Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison (p. 1).

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