Regional Literature

The paper looks at the development of a literary culture in South East Queensland from colonial times to the present. Economically, South East Queensland developed into a classic example of a port and administrative centre servicing a large, sparsely populated hinterland. Imaginatively, too, 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. Today, the contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘urban’ values operates ambiguously and at a highly localised level, in the same way that, as conurbation proliferates, the distinction between urban Brisbane and its ‘natural’ hinterland becomes increasingly blurred. Over the past 150 odd years, the hinterland has been reinvented as a landscape, economy and culture, and in literature it has become much more than a ‘natural’ counterpoint to ‘urban’ Brisbane: it is now represented as a protean site of great internal diversity where new lifestyles and new imaginative possibilities are generated. Rather than identifying a continuous and coherent development of literary culture in southeast Queensland, this article argues that it is in the region's discontinuities, contradictions and hybrid art practices that the modernity and dynamism of colonial cultural formations are located.
McKay, Belinda, ‘Imagining the Hinterland: Literary Representations of Southeast Queensland Beyond the Brisbane Line’, Queensland Review 12.1 (2005), 59-73.

The article "Vineta, Sedina, Griffin: A choice of literary examples of pomeranian myths around 1900" tackles the topic of regional myths at the turn of the 20th century in the Pomera-nian region as found – or not – in literary works written at the time in that region. The author analyz-es three examples of myths: two of them are traditional elements of the  Pomeranian cultural heritage, as shaped around 1900; the third is a failed attempt to create a local (Szczecin) myth at the turn of the 20th century and the following years. The analyzed texts were published in books and elsewhere (e. g. on postcards) or could be found as anonymous pieces, saved in handwritten copies.

The paper analyses six folk tales on the legendary pirate Klaus Störtebeker. The topic, known from the middle ages, was written down in the 19th century. Five of the works of reference come from the turn of the 20 th century, as the Klaus Störtebeker story reached the peak of its popularity. The sixth comes from the first voluminous anthology of the Pomeranian folk tales. Klaus Störtebeker is connected with Hamburg and the North Sea at mouth of the Elbe River the most often. However, in different versions of its tale there are many elements with reference to Western Pomerania that can be found. As they are shaped differently, the paper compares and analyses them.

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

Chapter 1 in Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton's CUP volume of essays on, among many other things, the "Long 1930s."

This chapter recovers English regional writers as part of the history of 1930s literature, arguing that they influenced the national imaginary and thus influenced national identity in distinct and measurable ways that perhaps only became clear in the context of World War II. At the center of its inquiry about these writers and 1930s writings are the questions: Who are the writers that make questions about regionalism and ruralism urgent for their admiring (or not so admiring) contemporaries? How do their works relate region to nation, provincial place to publishing center, rural representation to urban readers? And how does a more nuanced understanding of such relations change our construction of the history of 1930s literature? "Beyond Englishness" begins to answer these questions, directing scholarly attention to an almost entirely ignored set of writers whose verbal and visual images, literary styles, and strategies of relating regional to national identity define what could be called the new ruralism of the 1930s: Francis Brett Young who wrote about the West Midlands and Welsh Borderlands in the Mercian novels, including House under the Water (1932); Adrian Bell, who wrote about farming in Suffolk in the trilogy made up of Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1913), and The Cherry Tree (1932); A.G. Street who wrote about rural life in Wiltshire in Farmer’s Glory and Strawberry Roan (both 1932); and Flora Thompson who wrote about village life in Oxfordshire in the Candleford trilogy (1939-1943).

The article “Between »Femme Fragile« and »Femme Fatale«. The feminine Element as Future Indicator for the Pomeranian Society around 1900 in Hans Hoffmanns Stories From Farther Pomerania [Geschichten aus Hinterpommern]” tackles the topic of the social image of women at the turn of the 20th century in the Pomeranian region as found in literary works written by Hans Hoffmann at the time. By analyzing three of four novellas enclosed in Stories From Farther Pomerania, the author of the article states that the feminine element is a potential social power for future history of the region as the book's author seemed to believe. In the article, features of this element, personalized by female literary figures, are described and analyzed in the context of the stories and the social situation of that era.

The book by Roswitha Wisniewski, published in German in 2013, offers the very first thoroughly edited and relatively lengthy review of the development of literature in Pomerania from its beginnings until today. The study shall most probably be regarded as core literature for an extended period of time. As stated in the title, it is a history of only the German-language literature of the region. The few notes on aspects that leave a little to be desired do not change the comprehensive importance of the book.

Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. (Eliot, 1968) All moments of decolonisation in former colonies were engineered to assert a native and indigenous imaginary to rediscursify the colonial epistemology of cultural subjugation. Postcolonial ontologies are therefore journeys and quests in rerouting/re-rooting the fall outs of epistemic violence unleashed by the hegemon of colonial cognitivities. As a postcolonial nation India did the same by assigning upon itself the decolonial task of forging institutions and ideologies that can constitute a distinct national identity of univalence and a unitary logic of a imagined community that shares a common past of colonial exploitation. This historic negotiation between two temporal orders, one belonging to a colonial past and the other

The article problematizes the use of the term “minority” literature in the literary context, proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to the author of the paper, their definition proves to be too narrow and applicable only to a part of this literature and not to its entire corpus. The aim of the article is therefore to provide a new definition of “minority literature” by taking into account literature written by Slovenes living in Italy and literature written by Italians living in Slovenia and Croatia. As for the typological elements characteristic of literature written on the both sides of the Slovenian-Italian border, the article points out that the two literary systems are marked by the ontological dimension, interculturalism as an ethic value, pronounced national, linguistic and spatial elements, and historical memory. The article even goes a step forward and poses the question whether “minority literature” could be regarded as a completely independent supranational literary system.