Critical Regionalism

“Offers useful and accessible interpretive tools and a powerful interpretative lens with which to ponder region and culture.” — Journal of American Studies

“If you do not experience Doug Reichert Powell’s remarkable skills at close reading for yourself, you are missing out. Critical Regionalism is essential reading for publicly engaged intellectuals anywhere.” — Journal of Appalachian Studies

“[Filled] with a bevy of literary, geographic, cinematic, and historical sites.” — American Literary History

“An important book.” — Journal of Appalachian Studiesl

“Important to Iowans and anybody else who lives away from centers of national power.” — The Annals of Iowa

“Necessarily suggestive, open-ended, and tentative. . . . Envisions new and utopian possibilities for thought and social action while acknowledging the formidable tactical and theoretical obstacles to such changes.” — CHOICE

“[Reichert Powell’s] endeavor to uncover a critical regionalist literary aesthetic leads from an examination of the film Pulp Fiction (1994) to literary critiques of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939). . . . Raises important questions for any scholarly understanding of the South as region.” — Journal of Southern History

“Reichert Powell proposes a plan to improve the futures of geographically, culturally, and economically marginal communities in the United States by reconfiguring the ways in which they imagine themselves and the ways other, more powerful places imagine them as well. His analysis invites reading and contemplation from a wide range of disciplines — from literature, film, and media studies to pedagogy to regional studies — and specialists from one field will have their eyes opened by the way he sheds useful light on other fields, demonstrating perhaps unforeseen connections among different areas of study.” — Kent C. Ryden, University of Southern Maine

“Reichert Powell insightfully explores the particularities of his home region of east Tennessee as a window into the larger issues not only of the Appalachian region, but also of regionalism as a site of political and cultural analysis. His perspective is fresh, his writing lucid and graceful, his case studies wide ranging, and his analysis at times quite stunning.” — David E. Whisnant, author of All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region