Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation.

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

The title of Robert Jackson's book, Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation, begs a question: who are the seekers? Jackson is one, as are the four writers he considers at some length: Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Toni Morrison. But a chief value of Jackson's study is his understanding of the sometimes contradictory ways in which the American region has sought itself.

Jackson begins with a telling example from American popular culture, a reproduction of the cover of St. Louis's Central Magazine from July 1874 in which a map of the nation is rotated ninety degrees from its usual position so that St. Louis takes on "an almost obscenely privileged position of centrality" (p. 11). The magazine cover embodies the public boosterism of the Gilded Age, but Jackson looks closer and detects something more revealing: the distorted map "adopts the imperial model with what should be understood as quite earnest economic motives, but its comic, patently unrealistic mimicry of a more accurate map of the same national geography displays a satirical resistance to the idea of empire itself" (p. 15). In its seemingly inadvertent display of national and regional tensions and ambiguities, the map suggests the modernist and innovative literary expressions that Jackson explores in the subsequent chapters.

With The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Jackson foregrounds the personal experiences that left Mark Twain "with an increasingly problematic sense of his own place, his own kind of border status, in a national context that was seeking more and more to define itself in the strictly binary terms of northern Unionism and southern secessionism" (p. 31). Such conflicts play themselves out in the novel's fog episode, which Jackson makes the focus of a chapter that also includes provocative commentary on Life on the Mississippi, Missouri history, Unitarian minister William Greenleaf Eliot, and his grandson T. S. Eliot, whose "rigid and preconceived categories" could not account for the book's "unique and particular identity and achievement," which, Jackson convincingly demonstrates, "are made visible through a regional reading" (p. 47).

The chapters on Faulkner, O'Connor, and Morrison are equally engaging, equally encompassing. Jackson provides what to date may be the most illuminating comparison of Faulkner and the Nashville Agrarians, a group of writers who "advanced the most influential consciously regional movement in the literary history of the United States" (p. 67). Faulkner also figures prominently in the discussions of O'Connor and Morrison, both of whom acknowledged the scope and importance of Faulkner's vision while moving beyond him to chart the physical and spiritual contours of their own regional terrains.

In his conclusion Jackson returns to popular culture--to the 1944 Judy Garland film, Meet Me in St. Louis. With its sentimental, oversimplified, and myth-making depictions, the film seems harmless--a product of Hollywood--and yet it typifies a predominant political discourse regarding the American region in general. It is in such a context that Jackson positions the dissident voices of his study and in which he exploits the rich possibilities of American regional theory to reconceptualize American regional spaces.

WILL BRANTLEY

Middle Tennessee State University