Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production [Hardcover]

This book subjects the works of Elizabeth Spencer, critically acclaimed but canonically marginalized, to a study that reveals their interaction with the southern canon as they question its boundaries and remap the long-established landscapes of southern identity.Introduction: Backward Glances and Forward Thinking: Reconsidering Elizabeth Spencer 'A Sure Terrain': Spencer's Mississippi Novels Exploding the Can(n)on: The South as 'Another County' Inhabiting the Unhomely Moment in Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories 'Radical' Re-Envisionings of Home: The Night Travellers

Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographiesis a fine work of criticism and scholarship, masterly in its clarity, depth of insight informed by command of southern literary history and current feminist and postcolonial theory. The book is a model for the illuminating connections it makes between fiction and biography and is equally impressive in its careful tracing of Spencer's development as a southern writer in terms of her evolving conceptions of home and identity as reflected in her changing relation to the principles of the Fugitive-Agrarian writers in which her first Mississippi novels are grounded. - Elsa Nettles, author of Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather.

Catherine Seltzer s Elizabeth Spencer s Complicated Cartographies is a beautifully written, perceptive account of one of America s greatest living writers. Although born in Mississippi, Spencer refused to limit the localities of her many novels, stories and plays to that region, perhaps being most frequently recognized as the author of the located-in-Italy novella, The Light in the Piazza. As Seltzer notes in her conclusion and elsewhere, Spencer s fiction suggests new cartographies of the southern home, those literal - in its expansion of the borders of southern experience; spiritual - in its exploration of her characters complex responses to a myriad of homes; anlÃi