ABSTRACT
The subject of regionalism has once again become a central preoccupation of cultural criticism. What is noteworthy about this resurgence of the critical interest in regionalism is its feminist turn. In the late 1980s, feminist theorists began to recover the importance of a regionalist framework to U.S. women’s writing. Collections of literary and historical essays, such as Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997), The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (1993), and Writing the Range: Race, Class and Culture in the Women’s West (1991) began to appear in earnest in the 1990s. 1 In this chapter, I build on this work, but I am also interested in a specific analysis of how southern regionalism, specifically agrarianism, formulates the relation between private and public as gendered, how that gendered relation informs the southern regionalist paradigm, and how the writer Ellen Glasgow reveals in her work the marginalization of female labor and reproduction that is constitutive of this paradigm.
