Regionalism’s Climates (special issue of ALR)
Critics frequently frame American literary regionalism in geographical terms, whether by emphasizing a region’s spatial boundedness or emphasizing components of regionalist writing that stretch across space and scale. A similar negotiation of spatial scales from the proximate to the planetary has come to characterize recent conversations about climate change in the environmental humanities—for example in the work of Timothy Clark, Benjamin Morgan, and Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Regionalism’s engagements with place, scale, ecology, and everyday atmospheres make it a potentially generative form for representing climate, and yet few scholarly treatments have investigated the interconnections between American literary regionalism and climatic thought.