Home
western history
literary criticism
creative works
All Our Stories Are Here

All Our Stories Are Here

Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature

Edited by Brady Harrison

Published by: Nebraska

296 Pages

Hardcover
9780803213906
Published: June 2009

$50.00

BUY

eBook (PDF)
9780803222779
Published: June 2009

$50.00

BUY

Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

Description
AUTHOR BIO
Praise
TABLE OF CONTENTS

This wide-ranging collection of essays addresses a diverse and expanded vision of Montana literature, offering new readings of both canonical and overlooked texts. Although a handful of Montana writers such as Richard Hugo, A. B. Guthrie Jr., D’Arcy McNickle, and James Welch have received considerable critical attention, sizable gaps remain in the analysis of the state’s ever-growing and ever-evolving canon. The twelve essays in All Our Stories Are Here not only build on the exemplary, foundational work of other writers but also open further interpretative and critical conversations.

Expanding on the critical paradigms of the past and bringing to bear some of the latest developments in literary and cultural studies, the contributors engage issues such as queer ambivalence in Montana writing, representations of the state in popular romances, and the importance of the University of Montana’s creative writing program in fostering the state’s literary corpus. The contributors also explore the work of writers who have not yet received their critical due, take new looks at old friends, and offer some of the first explorations of recent works by well-established artists. All Our Stories Are Here conveys a sense of continuity in the field of Western literary criticism, while at the same time challenging conventional approaches to regional literature.

Brady Harrison is a professor of English at the University of Montana. He is the author of Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature and the editor of a scholarly edition of Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune.

Contributors: William W. Bevis, Nancy Cook, Steve Davenport, Tamas Dobozy, Roger Dunsmore, Brady Harrison, Matthew Jockers, Gregory L. Morris, Karl Olson, Andrea Opitz, Jim Rains, Lois Welch, and O. Alan Weltzien

"Harrison's collection includes a range of critical perspectives that invite both the general reader and the academic scholar to reconsider the richness of Montana writing."—Linda K. Karell, Montana, the Magazine of Western History

"This remarkable collection of essays offers something for every reader interested in Montana literature, from the well read to newcomers to the field. . . . Editor Brady Harrison deserves thanks and praise for a job very well done."—Sue Hart, Great Plains Quarterly

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Postpopulist Criticism

Part I: Does Place Matter?

1. Burning Montana: Richard Ford’s Wildlife and Regional Crisis

Tamas Dobozy

2. All My Stories Are Here: Four Montana Poets

Roger Dunsmore

3. West of Éire: Butte’s Irish Ethos

Matthew L. Jockers

Part II: Women Writing Montana

4. Home on the Range: Montana Romances and Geographies of Hope

Nancy Cook