Literary Regionalism

In our times, David Malouf in particular has transformed Brisbane into a city of the imagination as well as of bricks and mortar, or tongue and groove. This paper presents some earlier – and largely forgotten – evocations of Brisbane, beginning with Ludwig Leichhardt in 1844.

Brisbane Writers' Festival 2004 World War I represents something of a watershed in the participation of Brisbane women in literary life. There was a rapid increase in literary publications by women during and immediately after the war, and this was accompanied by an expansion of the range of subject matter tackled by women, and a diversification of genres. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of the inter-war period is that the more professional of Brisbane's women writers shifted their output from poetry and short stories to novels. A case in point is Mabel Forrest, a well-known prewar poet, who wrote several highly successful novels during the inter-war period, including The Wild Moth (1924) which was made into the film The Moth of Moonbi by Charles Chauvel in 1926. Another example is Zora Cross, a successful local poet who moved to Sydney in the latter part of World War I, and began to publish novels such as Sisters of the Seven Mile [1924] and The Lute Girl of Rainyvale [1925]. Brisbane's teenage poet, Ernestine Hemmings, also moved to Sydney after the war and became the journalist and non-fiction author Ernestine Hill. 1 These two kinds of shifts – from poetry to prose and from Brisbane to Sydney – which were made by women who made a living from writing meant that Brisbane's inter-war women poets tended to be amateur or semi-professional, deriving the bulk of their income from sources other than publications. While this tendency produced a rather genteel and conservative milieu, without much of an experimental edge, we shouldn't underestimate the contribution of these women. If there is one element that characterises the poetry of Brisbane women during and immediately after World War I, it is a retreat from the 'bush poetry' of the earlier period, and the emergence of a more cosmopolitan aesthetic encompassing a broader range of themes: war and empire, motherhood and womanliness, religion and morality, the sex question and race. Women poets of this period seem to have consciously taken on the role of public poets, helping to negotiate Brisbane's transition from a frontier town to a modern, cosmopolitan city in which women had a voice. The prolific and popular Emily Coungeau perhaps best exemplifies the new, self-consciously 'cosmopolitan' type of woman writer who came to prominence in Brisbane during World War I. Coungeau was born in Essex in about 1860. As a teenager, she became a ladies' companion, travelling extensively in the Mediterranean and becoming fluent in five languages. She migrated to Australia in 1887 at the age of 17, and in 1889 married Naoum Coungeau, an Albanian restaurant keeper whom she had met on the island of Lesbos. 2 The couple moved to Brisbane, and from 1889 until 1919 they operated a wine saloon in Petrie Bight, almost opposite the Customs House. Here the Coungeaus served light wines, a continental style luncheon with fruit and confectionery, and a renowned café au lait made to Emily's special recipe. 3 The journalist Bernice May later recalled the saloon in 1916 as 'a picturesque place which was crowded with soldiers,

New Orleans is unique – which is precisely why there are many Crescent Cities all over the world: for almost 150 years, writers, artists, cultural brokers, and entrepreneurs have drawn on and simultaneously contributed to New Orleans’s fame and popularity by recreating the city in popular media from literature, photographs, and plays to movies, television shows, and theme parks. Addressing students and fans of the city and of popular culture, Popular New Orleans examines three pivotal moments in the history of New Orleans in popular media: the creation of the popular image of the Crescent City during the late nineteenth century in the local-color writings published in Scribner’s Monthly/Century Magazine; the translation of this image into three-dimensional immersive spaces during the twentieth century in Disney’s theme parks and resorts in California, Florida, and Japan; and the radical transformation of this image following Hurricane Katrina in public performances such as Mardi Gras parades and operas. Covering visions of the Crescent City from George W. Cable’s Old Creole Days stories (1873-1876) to Disneyland’s "New Orleans Square" (1966) to Rosalyn Story’s opera Wading Home (2015), Popular New Orleans traces how popular images of New Orleans have changed from exceptional to exemplary.

This paper examines how contemporary literary fiction responds to the climate crisis and the attendant call for a seemingly universalist "species view" of human beings. What does it mean to think of the human as a species, how can we find traces of species being in literature, and how do they interact with other dimensions of human lives? To address these questions, the paper confronts recent accounts of historical context, animal characters, and capitalist time with Annie Proulx's Barkskins (2016). As this confrontation shows, Proulx's novel teaches its readers to be a specieswithout ignoring differences of race, class, and gender. abstract © FRAME NO. 29.2 NOVEMBER 2016 | 71 -90

This chapter from By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland 1859-2001 (Buckridge and McKay 2007) explores the shifting literary representations over the past 150 years of Brisbane’s hinterland. South-East Queensland – the region encompassed by Coolangatta and the McPherson Range to the south, Cooloola and the Blackall Range to the north, and the Great Dividing Range to the west – represents one of Queensland’s most significant literary landscapes. For millennia, its inhabitants elaborated the meaning of the landscape in a rich complex of stories and other cultural practices such as the bunya festivals. Colonisation disrupted but did not obliterate these cultural associations, which remain alive in the oral traditions of local Aboriginal people and, in more recent times, have surfaced in the work of writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her literary successors. European interest in the Moreton Bay region developed slowly. In colonial times, the south-eastern corner of the colony came to be represented in literature as a region of cultural contrasts, in which the urban life of Brisbane was juxtaposed against the natural or rural character of the surrounding region, which was often characterised as a hinterland in the figurative sense of a relatively unexplored and mysterious territory. This contrapuntal representation of South-East Queensland was first elaborated in a number of novels by Rosa Praed. Today, however, the sharp literary contrast between urban and natural environments in South-East Queensland is disappearing as the hinterland’s relationship with Brisbane undergoes a radical transformation. Conurbation is obliterating the natural environment and generating a vast suburbia that already stretches from Coolangatta to Noosa, and is now spreading up the river valleys of the Scenic Rim. The longstanding literary dichotomy of ‘urban’ Brisbane and the ‘natural’ or ‘rural’ landscapes of its surrounds is transmuting along with the landscape and economy of South-East Queensland.

This article broaches the issue on narrative genres
written in Caquetá (Colombian) between 2000
and 2015. After describing its main features, of
which transculturation phenomenon takes place
through the identitary myth of la manigua (the
rainforest spell), this lecture revises literacy and
writing condition that give raise to the corpus
studied and its exclusion from national and
regional literature canons. This leads to
reconsider literary history and aesthetics criteria
in order to study these texts, and propose
literature didactics as a fundamental device for
consolidating literature written in Caquetá.
Despite its linguistic and narrative imperfection,
these texts use their own language and create
their own territory and identity, something that
the literary institution must take into account

The present thesis aimed to explore the possibilities of using Davao Filipino, the variety of Filipino spoken in the Mindanao areas of Kidapawan and Davao, as a literary medium, and of the implications to using it in this manner. Specifically, it aimed to determine: how DF could be linguistically described; how DF can be used as a literary language; and in what communicative contexts, as replicated in fiction and plays, DF can be used. The discussion of existing literature relating to the subject medium, the production of literary works, and the discussion of these same works provide answers to these questions.
It was determined that Davao Filipino is the result of the linguistic diversity in Mindanao and serves as a potent tool for the de-Tagalization of Filipino. Furthermore, it was defined as the Tagalog based inadvertent language contact spoken on a first language basis in Davao and Kidapawan, and features borrowings that are predictable. It was further determined that writing in DF presents both difficulties and advantages: the fact that it is a primarily spoken medium means there is a need to grow more accustomed to using it in writing, but the variety’s nature as language contact provided for elegant variation and terminological precision, allowed for preservation of idiom and figure of speech authentic to the locale, and its colloquial origins allow for free indirect speech in third person narration. The expressive limitations of DF’s colloquial origins could also be taken advantage of in first person narration, stream of consciousness, and in dialogue. Its social implications, vis-à-vis the other languages—and other forms of language contact—spoken in its locale can also be used to authentically represent social backgrounds. Translating in DF—particularly for third person limited narration—made the narration more intimate because of DF’s predominant usage in speech. Moreover, DF could be used in a wide array of communicative contexts, ranging from casual conversations, to expressions of fear, love, and hatred. Its usage as a third person omniscient narration medium or as medium for stage instructions was not impossible, although this study pointed out the novelty in such usages. But its usage in formal public speaking contexts was observed to be problematic owing to the conventions of that field, which favoured the standard Tagalog. Five short stories and seven plays written by the researcher are included in the study.

The Indian short story is not merely a derivative of the Western genre, but owes much to the great story-telling tradition of Indian antiquity. The mythical and legendary tales as well as folktales have provided a fertile soil for the modern Indian short story to germinate. Beginning towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Indian short story flourished in the twentieth century. It became evident by the end of the past century that the canon is attuned to Indian landscape whose heterogeneous people and their diverse experiences it reflects so faithfully. The Indian short story as a distinct genre resembles a “multicoloured glass” scattering myriad hues which is analogous to the diversity of our country itself. The variegated and unbeaten genre righteously deserves critical attention which it has been deprived of.

With twenty-seven scholarly articles by academics, professors and researchers, the present critical volume is a tribute to an affluent but neglected genre of Indian literature. In accord with the genre itself, the scope of the book allows for such diversity as the classic writers like Tagore and Manto; the feminist writers like Ismat Chughtai, Kamala Das, Shashi Deshpande and Indira Goswami; the dalit writers like Bama and Ajay Navaria; the diaspora writers like Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. The reworking of myth by Mahasweta Devi, the nature lore of Ruskin Bond, the saga of exile by the Kashmiri Pandits, the satire of Hari Shankar Parsai, the macabre tales of Satyajit Ray, the problematics of identity in Manoj Das and memory in Temsula Ao—all are taken into consideration within the structure of a single volume to make this a stimulating overview for students and scholars of Indian literature.

Para os objetivos deste trabalho 2 , é importante contar com uma definição de "Regionalismo", verificável na tradição da literatura brasileira. Por este motivo, procedeu-se a um levantamento do uso do termo, entre os mais importantes críticos e historiadores.

Combining the theoretical background of Literary Geography
and Culture Studies with methodology of teaching literature, the author
proposed the “virtual excursion” as the type of lecture (cycle of lectures),
which might effectively assist the shaping understanding of the regional
literature/culture among students of English. “Literary Landmarks
of Boston and Boston Area” has been provided as an example of such
a lecture, which can be used both as an introductory one delivered solely by the lecturer, a closing one, performed in high interaction with students, or used as a layout for students’ independent group/individual projects. The practical implementation presupposes to display the integral knowledge about the area, its history and culture, on the part of students, and to provide guidance, if necessary, on the part of the teacher. The author stresses the high level of students’ involvement into this kind of activity due to their ability not only to prove their subject knowledge, but also discover links between the historical context, cultural phenomena, their reflection in the text, and geography, which increases student’s creativity.

This paper shows and analyzes how the question of family, literary and national heritage are related to regional place in three Québécois contemporary short stories (La Héronnière, by Lise Tremblay) and short stories novels (Arvida, by Samuel Archibald and Atavismes, by Raymond Bock). The author argues that place and heritage are strongly knitted in these fictions : in La Héronnière, rural characters fear that neo-rural and urban aliens are taking away women with their feminine manners and values; in Arvida, the narrator-author finds a way to invent a heritage for his native industrial small-town, an action of telling that at the same time allows him to enter Literature and Memory; in Atavismes, collective inheritances are at stake for the 13 male characters who fight for (or against) memory.

The region has attained a remarkable centrality during the past two decades. Besides signifying a spatial parameter, the concept of the region embraces a wide range of political, economical, and cultural factors, which constitute the historical and cultural heritage of individual regions and contribute to the construction, negotiation, and revaluation of cultures and identities attached to them. 'Regions of culture' and 'regions of identity' are to be understood as concepts which summarise these processes of negotiating and sharing cultural values, concepts and practices, and as points of reference in the process of identity formation in relation to space. Offering a wide range of perspectives and disciplines including history, linguistics, literary studies, art history, cultural anthropology, and religious studies, this volume explores the structural and cultural foundations of spaces that qualify as 'regions' and their developments, challenges, and sustainability in an increasingly globalised world. In addition to discussing the concepts of 'region', 'culture', and 'identity', the essays assembled in this volume provide critical case-studies of historical and current regions of culture and regions of identity, illustrating constitutive factors of culture and identity in relation to regional space.

This paper seeks to introduce the codex 1066 of the Abbey Library of St. Gall which contains a version of the Meister Eckhart sermon “Misit dominus manum suam” (Quint 53). This text was known until now through the Nuremberg manuscript Cod. Cent. VI 58 that proved to be the prototype of the St. Gall copy. With regard to the material philological aspects of the single manuscript this study focuses on the cultural context which provided the background to the genesis of the St. Gall manuscript Cod. 1066 and to the reception of the newly identified copy of the sermon version mentioned above.

Der vorliegende Beitrag ist dem Kodex 1066 der St. Galler Stiftsbibliothek gewidmet, der eine Bearbeitung der Eckhart-Predigt „Misit dominus manum suam“ (Quint 53) überliefert. Man kannte diesen (Re-)Text bislang nur aus der Nürnberger Handschrift Cod. Cent. VI 58, einer Handschrift wohlgemerkt, die sich als die unmittelbare Vorlage für die St. Galler Abschrift erwiesen hat. Aus einem dezidiert materialphilologischen Interesse heraus wird in dieser Studie nach dem kulturellen Kontext gefragt, in dem die Entstehung des St. Galler Kodex 1066 zu sehen ist und in dem das neu identifizierte Re-Skript des genannten Re-Textes der Eckhart-Predigt 53 gelesen wurde.

FEHLERKORREKTUR zu Anm. 84: Die Leipziger Handschrift des "Legatus divinae pietatis" (Ms. 827) enthält keine Angaben über Gertruds Familien- bzw. Geschlechtsnamen! Dafür überliefert sie einige Kapitel auch aus Buch I des "Legatus", s. dazu demnächst Almuth Märker/Balázs J. Nemes: "hunc tercium conscripsi cum maximo labore occultandi" Schwester N von Helfta und ihre 'Sonderausgabe' des "Legatus diviniae pietatis" Gertruds von Helfta in der Leipziger Handschrift Ms 827, in: Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 2015/2

Bevor ich auf die wahrlich sensationellen, weil dem Entstehungsort und der Entstehungszeit des "Fließenden Lichts" besonders nahe stehenden Moskauer Fragmente zu sprechen komme (Abschnitt III), werde ich eine Reihe von Text- und Rezeptionszeugen des 15. Jahrhunderts vorstellen, auf die ich während meiner Arbeit an der Dissertation bzw. meiner Mitarbeit an der Neuedition der "Lux divinitatis" gestoßen bin (Abschnitt II). Die Funde sind wichtig, denn sie werfen ein neues Licht auf die Rezeption des "Fließenden Lichts" bzw. seiner lateinischen Übersetzung im mitteldeutschen Raum, wobei auffällt, dass sich diese vor allem auf die Erfurter Kartause St. Salvatorberg konzentriert. Im Anschluss an die Vorstellung der Moskauer Handschrift im Abschnitt III, der neben inhaltlichen Aspekten text- und überlieferungsgeschichtliche Fragen behandelt, soll der Fund in einen größeren literaturgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang gestellt und seine Bedeutung im Hinblick auf die immer wieder behauptete singuläre Stellung des "Fließenden Lichts" in der literarischen Landschaft des 13. Jahrhunderts skizziert werden (Abschnitt IV). Der letzte Teil des Beitrags knüpft an die im Abschnitt II vorgestellten Neufunde an und nennt Eckpunkte einer ‚dichten Beschreibung‘, die zur Profilierung der Mechthild-Rezeption in der Erfurter Kartause in der zweiten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts beitragen könnten.

"Während der Bestand der Bibliotheca Batthyaneum in Karlsburg/Alba Iulia als relativ gut erforscht gelten darf, weiß man über die deutschsprachigen Codices in den Bibliotheken
und Archiven in Heltau/Cisnǎdie, Hermannstadt/Sibiu und Bukarest relativ wenig. Einige Bestandslisten kann Nemes durch Handschriftenfunde ergänzen, die er im Zuge eines eigenen Projekts, einer rumänischen Literaturgeschichte, und
durch Hinweise von Kollegen (wieder-)entdeckt hat

Proiectul enunţat îşi asumă obiectivul de a reuni într-un catalog manuscrisele medievale de limbă germană aflate în bibliotecile şi arhivele din România, o lucrare pe a cărei bază se conturează – dintr-o perspectivă regională axată asupra Transilvaniei – istoria literaturii germane medievale de pe teritoriul actual al României. Din punct de vedere metodologic este esenţială racordarea la direcţiile actuale de cercetare promovate în cadrul medievisticii cultivate de germanişti, tendinţe, care opun conceptului de istorie a producţiei literare, concept organizat exclusiv în jurul autorului şi operei, o viziune literar-istoriografică circumscrisă regional şi orientată pregnant în sensul identificării transmiterii textuale, modalitate prin care poate fi cuprinsă producţia literară dintr-o arie geografică determinată. O istorie a literaturii din perspectivă regională, cu o atenţie sporită îndreptată asupra Transilvaniei, nu se va opri exclusiv asupra expresiei germane, ci îşi va lărgi orizontul într-un efort interdisciplinar, prin cooptarea în analiză şi a producţiei, respectiv a receptării scrisului în limba maghiară, dar în special în latină, ţinând seama astfel de eventualele interferenţe literare. Avantajul unei astfel de perspective asupra istoriei literaturii, netributară unei anumite „literaturi naţionale”, este faptul că se deschide calea în direcţia unor concluzii care privesc producţia literară a unui areal (multi)cultural în ansamblu său."

What if we radically changed the scale of our imagination as literary readers and cultural historians? Developing recent claims on behalf of the importance of a broader, planetary perspective in literary history, this article argues that the study of Dutch literature would benefit from a 'big historicism', which takes into account the age of the earth and actively reconstructs the changing literary representation of the prehistoric past and the posthuman future. More specifically, the article analyzes the role of 'deep time' in classic and contemporary forms of Dutch fiction, including novels Surveying a variety of recent methods in literary studies that includes the vogue of the 'transnational' and the plea for 'distant reading', the American critic Mark McGurl has pointed out that these approaches all hint at a fundamental methodological question that is rarely raised, let alone fully addressed: the question of scale. 2 At the end of The Program Era (2009), his seminal account of the deep ties between postwar American fiction and the creative writing program, he therefore raises this question himself:

This essay tracks the poetics and geopolitics of a "world gone wrong" in two influential forms of the global system articulated as a cultural-political dominant: one, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which is Anglo-American and post-imperial in its overall operation, tropes, stories, and tactics; and the other is Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters (La Republique Mondiale des Lettres), which is seemingly cosmopolitan yet Franco-centric in its over-extended model of how "the world republic of (literary) letters" works as cultural capital and "literary domination" under postcolonialism from Maori New Zealand to decolonizing Ireland and Nobel Prize-seeking South Korea. As an alternative model of globalization more adequate to our "worlding" situation, region, and time, the essay turns, by way of counter-gesture move, towards more Asia/Pacific-based modes of cultural emergence surging up across "Oceania" as theorized and enacted, among others, by Epeli Hau'ofa, the Tongan writer at the University of South Pacific. The transdisciplinary pedagogy and interventions into globalization discourse via "worlding" would help envision and shape what such a global/local, transnational, and borderlands concept of regionalization can do to counter the reign of the neo-liberal world republic of domination and inequity.

Este artículo ofrece una visión histórica amplia del estado de Nuevo León hasta el presente, y particularmente sobre la ciudad de Monterrey. Se concentra en las acciones de diferentes políticos, gobernadores, especialmente de los llamados "ateneístas", su enfoque principal no es la explotación de los planes sociales generales, sino un proceso menos obvio y más profundo, cultural, humanista, educativo, artístico: la fundación de la Universidad de Nuevo León es uno de sus resultados. Así, la figura de Alfonso Reyes, como gran referente regional, y los ideales educativos surgidos de la Revolución promovidos por políticos e intelectuales como Raúl Rangel Frías, Aaron Sáenz Garza y José Alvarado son pensados en el contexto de diálogo que ha definido la cultura regiomontana.

During signing Chabahar-Gwadar Memorandum of Understanding 2016 between Sanaullah Zahri (Chief Minister of Balochistan) and Ali Osat Hashemi (Governor of Sistan-o-Balochistan), both countries announced distinct plans regarding availing regional economic development, regional peace and regional connectivity. At one side, when China and Pakistan have been engaged in China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, this MoU between Iran and Pakistan has not only paved a way to connect Chabahar and Gwadar by declaring them the "sister port cites" but, it would also extend CPEC from Gwadar to Chabahar. This study analyzes the impacts of Chabahar-Gwadar MoU 2016 on national economic growth of Pakistan, and, looks this connectivity under broader concept of regional connectivity within the framework of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. As China and Pakistan have already been decided to extended CPEC in two dimensions;  Towards Northeastern Afghanistan and then Uzbekistan via Peshawar-Landi Kotal railway track, and,  Towards Southwestern Afghanistan and then Turkmenistan via Quetta-Chaman railway track; Iranian association with CPEC via this memorandum would not only convert Pakistan into rapid emerging economic power in the "Central and South Asia", but also assist Iranian resistive and protectionist economy. As India tried a lot to disengage Iran against Chabahar-Gwadar connectivity, study evaluates how Iran moved once again towards Pakistan, China and CPEC, and This paper has been submitted for the International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities (ICSSH'21), organized by the Department of Pakistan Studies at the Islamia University of Bahawalpur dated 27-28 December, 2021. Being a Vice-President of Pak-Iran Intellectuals Forum, Dr. Muhammad Asim presented this "primary-research based" paper. This paper has also been published by Pak-Iran Intellectuals Forum (Islamabad Office) in the monthly report of January 2022.

This article explores the poetry of François Jaffrennou, who published under the druidic pseudonym Taldir ab Hernin, as a case study in decolonized multilingualism. Close readings of Taldir’s writing in Breton, Welsh and French reveal the pressures of negotiating a hybrid Celtic-French identity, as he affirms his Celticity while maintaining a careful relationship with France. Taldir criticizes the French state in his Welsh texts, whereas in French and Breton his critique is more guarded, subtly codified. The Celtic space which emerges here is full of tensions, as Taldir works both within and against the impulse to reconcile Celtic and French identities. I argue that being provincially Other in France requires a delicate balancing act, a special way of being French. I also contend that to work on the local is to work on the global, looking beyond regionalist and postcolonial approaches to Breton writing in an effort to dismantle the monolingualizing tendencies of French Studies.

Novelist Eleanor Dark’s years in Montville represent an unusual moment in the history of Queensland literature: it was one of the rare instances, until recent times, of an established professional writer moving to Queensland and pursuing her career in a small rural community in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. From this vantage point Dark wrote Lantana Lane, a kind of grass-roots political manifesto in which she intertwines meticulous observation of local life, in which she participated as a farmer, with wider cultural and political concerns. She transforms the apparently inauspicious location of the hinterland into a vantage point from which to reflect on modes of production, from the agricultural to the literary. Lantana Lane is a surprisingly optimistic product of the Cold War era, but it is too grounded in the lived experience of both farming and writing to be mawkishly sentimental or naïvely utopian. The external threats to the local way of life can only be resisted, not defeated, by this small community of ‘anachronisms’ and there is no doubt that ‘The Deviation’, which will sweep the Lane into the global capitalist economy, will sooner or later raise its ugly head again. Lantana Lane celebrates the precarious and perhaps fleeting survival of a community of independent thinkers in the inauspicious location of the hinterland of southeast Queensland, and the survival of literature – and its potential to develop independence of thought in serious readers – in anachronistic rather than ‘advanced’ communities in an era of mass communications. 

Belinda McKay, ‘Writing from the Hinterland: Eleanor Dark’s Queensland Years’, Queensland Review 8.2 (2001), 21-28.

Writing Region: Robert Kroetsch and the Poetics of Prairie Space (John Thieme)

Abstract
This article considers the problematics of writing region with a particular focus on the formal strategies employed to represent Prairie space in four novels by the Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch. It locates Kroetsch’s work in relation to the fiction of his Western Canadian predecessors, Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell, arguing that while they, too, are concerned with depicting the specifics of the Prairie environment, their approach is shackled by an adherence to the conventions of classic realism. It suggests that such conventions are best an inadequate vehicle for rendering the full gamut of Prairie experience and at worst an artificial set of rules, based on discourses of enclosure better suited to the more bounded worlds of European social situations. In contrast, Kroetsch’s work turns to whimsy, fantasy, ellipsis, discontinuity and incompletion in an endeavour to develop a poetics that will do justice to the complexities of the human relationship with Prairie “distance”. The article also considers the extent to which Kroetsch’s fiction replaces older Prairie gender codes with a new androgynous social model. It concludes by suggesting that his development of a range of non-realistic techniques to give voice to marginalized peoples and places offers a possible blueprint for writers around the globe who face the challenge of how to articulate the experience of unrepresented or under-represented regions.

Keywords
Regional writing, Prairie fiction, Spatial poetics, Robert Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian, Badlands, What the Crow Said

Schlagwörter: Literaturtopographie und topographical turn, historische Text-Identität und Text-Entität, Textgeschichte als Raum-Kategorie

The transmission of texts in the Middle Ages bears traces of a trail of past interpretations. The article maps this topography, which can be observed both at syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels of a text’s history. In topography we stress the graphic element, as this is proving significant not only because the graphic nature can be conceptualized in spatial categories, but because scriptorial practices create spatial structures of localisation, which must be traced through historical analysis.

Die mittelalterliche Überlieferung von Texten ist von Trampelpfaden vergangener Deutungen geprägt. Die Metapher des Trampelpfades verleiht der Überlieferung eine räumliche Dimension, über die sie zweifelsohne nicht nur im metaphorischen Sinn verfügt. Diese Topographie, die sich sowohl auf der syntagmatischen als auch der paradigmatischen Ebene der Geschichte eines Textes beobachten lässt, gilt es im vorliegenden Aufsatz zu kartieren. Wie die kulturwissenschaftlich orientierte Raumforschung operiert diese Studie mit einem Topographie-Begriff, der die in der handschriftlichen Überlieferung beobachtbaren epistemologischen Ordnungs- und Verortungsverfahren von geographisch definierbaren Orten und konkreten Institutionen zwar nicht entbindet, doch dabei vor allem die Praktiken der Verortung, d. h. das Graphische am Topographischen, akzentuiert. Es geht demnach insofern um Orte, als sie Verortungen produzieren, und insofern um Räume, als sie Räume der Einschreibung darstellen. Die Überlieferung erweist sich vor diesem Hintergrund nicht nur deswegen als bedeutsam, weil sie sich in spatialen Kategorien konzeptualisieren lässt, sondern auch deswegen, weil sie in ihren durch Verortungs- und Einschreibungspraktiken entstandenen spatialen Ordnungen Deutungen konserviert, die durch historische Lektüren erschlossen werden können.

En este artículo ofrezco una lectura del problema de la nación en la novela regionalista A bagaceira (1928), de José Américo de Almeida. Su protagonista, Lucio, un joven reformador de la hacienda nordestina, intenta generar una nueva comunidad nacional que conjugue dos mundos culturales enfrentados: el del brejo y el del sertão. Parto derivando la estructura del mundo novelesco desde la personalidad de Lucio, estructura que establece la lectura de la naturaleza (del mundo sensible) como vía para alcanzar el conocimiento auténtico de la cultura brasileña. Sin embargo, la síntesis nacional fracasa porque Lucio no se atreve a emprender esta lectura ni a transformar su imagen heredada. Esto se debe a un cambio epistemológico en los modos de leer la nación: desde un modelo medieval, en que lo imaginario es una base válida para el conocimiento eficaz, a uno moderno, que desecha esta esfera de la experiencia.

This article offers a perspective on the national problem present in the brasilian regionalist novel A bagaceira (1928), by José Américo de Almeida. Its main character, Lucio, young reformer of the nordestine fazenda, tries to found a new national community by binding together two confronted cultural worlds: the brejo and the sertão. First, I derivate the structure of the novelistic world from Lucio´s personality; according to this, the reading of nature (sensible world) provides the knowledge of the brasilian culture. Nonetheless, the national synthesis fails because Lucio doesn´t consider this reading nor does he transform its inherited image. My thesis is that this situation is due to an epistemological shift: from the medieval model, which recognises the imaginary as valid foundation for effective knowledge, to the modern model, that detaches the imaginary from the realm of experience.

The main characteristics of Upper Silesia are national, cultural and language diversity and fluidity, as well as nation-based and a-national, or even non-national self-identifications (e.g. macro- and microregional, but also based on faith etc.). The study focuses on the transnational features of Upper Silesia as a cultural borderland, in regard to an issue of creating a canon of Upper Silesian literature. Therefore, the canon shall be perceived as a cultural activity which builds relations not only with dominant or major cultures, but also with minor ones – in order to enhance so-called minor transnationalism (Lionnet, Shu-mei Shin 2005). Considering the nature of the Upper Silesian borderland, regional/local canon should consist of works written at least in four languages and several dialects (German, Czech, Polish, Lach, Silesian
ethnolects/dialects), and should take into account far more self-identifi cations. The main questions authors of the canon(s) have to answer are: A) What does ‘Upper Silesian’ mean? B) What should be considered as Upper Silesian literature? C) Does a local canon / the Upper Silesian canon needs to be complemented by the world’s greatest works, namely by the hypercanon (using David Damrosch’s term)? D) Whether a literary description alone of an experience of living on the borderland, regardless of location, is enough to place it among the most important literary works for Upper Silesian culture?
Four the most influential attempts to create the Upper Silesian canon are analyzed in the chapter. Two of them are ‘conservative’ minor canons focused only on regional/local – though multilingual – literature: Th e Gems of Silesian Literature (Perły literatury śląskiej / Juwelen schlesischer Literatur, publication series; published since 2003) and The 40 Choose Canon (40 wybiera kanon, “Fabryka Silesia” 2012, no. 1). In addition, another two attempts can be considered within the terms of minor transnationalism, i.e. they establish a complex dialog with other cultures (major as well as minor): 99 Books or Small Upper Silesian Canon (99 książek czyli mały kanon górnośląski, ed. by Z. Kadłubek, 2011) and Canon Silesiae (publication series, published since 2012). All of these canons have subversive potential but also could be a mean of exchanging thoughts on a subject, and enable free flow of ideas.

In 2007, Patrick Buckridge and I published an edited collection, By the Book, which presents a wide-ranging, regionally organised history of the literature of Queensland from the time of its creation as an independent colony in the mid-nineteenth century up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Like Raymond Evans’s History of Queensland, coincidentally also published in 2007, By the Book was the first attempt in many years to review and re-map its field. Indeed, it is only the second comprehensive history of literature in Queensland, the first being Cecil Hadgraft’s Queensland and Its Writers in 1959. By the Book was the outcome of a large collaborative project funded by the ARC. This paper reflects on the research process, and also reflects on what a regional literary history can tell us.

O artigo traça um amplo panorama histórico do estado de Nuevo León até a atualidade,  e mais particularmente da cidade de Monterrey. Focaliza a atuação de diferentes políticos, governadores,  principalmente dos denominados “ateneístas”, pois o seu foco principal não é a exploração de planos sociais gerais, mas um processo menos evidente mas muito profundo, o cultural, humanístico, educativo, artístico, de que a fundação da Universidade de Nuevo León é um de seus resultados. Daí a presença da figura de Alfonso Reyes, principalmente, acompanhado de outros como Raúl Rangel Frías, Aaron Sáenz Garza, José Alvarado.


The article provides a broad historical overview of Nuevo León state to the present, and particularly about the city of Monterrey. Concentrates on the actions of different politicians, governors, especially the so-called ”ateneístas” because its main focus is not the exploitation of general social plans, but a less obvious process but too deep, cultural, humanistic, educational, artistic, of which the founding of the University of Nuevo Leon is one of its results. Thus the presence of the figure of Alfonso Reyes, mainly, accompanied by others like Raúl Rangel Frías, Aaron Sáenz Garza, José Alvarado.