The Literature of the Ozarks

An Anthology

Phillip Douglas Howerton

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781682260852, 9781682260845
• eBook ISBN: 9781610756587
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The job of regional literature is twofold: to explore and confront the culture from within, and to help define that culture for outsiders. Taken together, the two centuries of Ozarks literature collected in this ambitious anthology do just that. The fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama presented in The Literature of the Ozarks complicate assumptions about backwoods ignorance, debunk the pastoral myth, expand on the meaning of wilderness, and position the Ozarks as a crossroads of human experience with meaningful ties to national literary movements.

Among the authors presented here are an Osage priest, an early explorer from New York, a native-born farm wife, African American writers who protested attacks on their communities, a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and an art history professor who created a fictional town and a postmodern parody of the region's stereotypes.

The Literature of the Ozarks establishes a canon as nuanced and varied as the region's writers themselves.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One | Beginnings to 1865 | The Emergence of a Region
• Part Two | 1865–1918 | The Social Construction of a Regional Culture
• Part Three | 1918–1945 | The Promotion of a Regional Image
• Part Four | 1945–Current | The Deconstruction of a Regional Image
• Notes