Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographies / American Literature Readings in the 21st Century (PDF)

CATHERINE SELTZER Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, USA, specializing in American Literature and Women's Studies.

"Elizabeth Spencer's Complicated Cartographiesis a fine work of criticism and scholarship, masterly in its clarity, depth of insight informed by command of southern literary history and current feminist and postcolonial theory. The book is a model for the illuminating connections it makes between fiction and biography and is equally impressive in its careful tracing of Spencer's development as a southern writer in terms of her evolving conceptions of "home" and "identity" as reflected in her changing relation to the principles of the Fugitive-Agrarian writers in which her first "Mississippi" novels are grounded." - Elsa Nettles, author of Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather.

"Catherine Seltzer s Elizabeth Spencer s Complicated Cartographies is a beautifully written, perceptive account of one of America s greatest living writers. Although born in Mississippi, Spencer refused to limit the localities of her many novels, stories and plays to that region, perhaps being most frequently recognized as the author of the located-in-Italy novella, The Light in the Piazza. As Seltzer notes in her conclusion and elsewhere, Spencer s fiction "suggests new cartographies of the southern home, those literal - in its expansion of the borders of southern experience; spiritual - in its exploration of her characters complex responses to a myriad of homes; and artistic - in its growing challenge to the expectations established by her literary mentors." As Seltzer goes on to say, more than any other Southern writer Spencer has a "gift for merging familiar and foreign terrain," thereby challenging conventional southern ideological topographies, implying that "that there is much more of southern identity to be mapped." Seltzer s insightful criticism makes her audience want to reread all of Spencer s masterful oeuvre." - Kimball King, Professor Emeritus, The University of North Carolina and one-time Chair of the Conference of Editors of