A Certain Slant of Light

A Certain Slant of Light - Cover

Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction

by David Marion Holman

introduction by Louis D. Rubin

160 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

Literary Criticism / American

Hardcover / 9780807118702 / November 1995

In A Certain Slant of Light, David Marion Holman examines two enormously productive regional American literatures—those of the South and the Midwest—from about 1832 to 1925. By focusing on the role history plays in the imaginations of selected writers of that period, he seeks to answer a perennial question: What is “Midwestern” about Midwestern literature, and what is “southern” about southern literature?

What emerges from Holman’s unique study is solid documentation of a genuinely creative divergence in the literary imaginations of two kinds of American writing, each of which resulted in some of the most distinguished literature of the twentieth century. 

David Marion Holman taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Texas A&M University and was assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi at the time of his death in 1988. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. , the founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and a founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, taught English and creative writing for many years, mainly at Johns Hopkins University, Hollins College, and the University of North Carolina. (Annie Dillard, Kaye Gibbons, John Barth, and Lee Smith are just a few of his former students.) He has written or edited some forty-five books of his own, the most recent of which are The Edge of the Swamp, Small Craft Advisory,and The Mockingbird in the Gum Tree. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and in his spare time pursues his interests in painting, boating, military history, and baseball.

Jerry Leath Mills is professor of English at the University of North Carolina. He is editor of Studies in Philology and a passionate hunter and angler.

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