All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature

by Brady Harrison

Overview

This wide-ranging collection of essays addresses a diverse and expanded vision of Montana literature, offering new readings of both canonical and overlooked texts. Although a handful of Montana writers such as Richard Hugo, A. B. Guthrie Jr., D’Arcy McNickle, and James Welch have received considerable critical attention, sizable gaps remain in the analysis of the state’s ever-growing and ever-evolving canon. The twelve essays in All Our Stories Are Here not only build on the exemplary, foundational work of other writers but also open further interpretative and critical conversations.
 
Expanding on the critical paradigms of the past and bringing to bear some of the latest developments in literary and cultural studies, the contributors engage issues such as queer ambivalence in Montana writing, representations of the state in popular romances, and the importance of the University of Montana’s creative writing program in fostering the state’s literary corpus. The contributors also explore the work of writers who have not yet received their critical due, take new looks at old friends, and offer some of the first explorations of recent works by well-established artists. All Our Stories Are Here conveys a sense of continuity in the field of Western literary criticism, while at the same time challenging conventional approaches to regional literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803222779
Publisher:	University of Nebraska Press
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	350 KB

About the Author

Brady Harrison is a professor of English at the University of Montana. He is the author of Agent of Empire: William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature and the editor of a scholarly edition of Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune.  
Contributors: William W. Bevis, Nancy Cook, Steve Davenport, Tamas Dobozy, Roger Dunsmore, Brady Harrison, Matthew Jockers, Gregory L. Morris, Karl Olson, Andrea Opitz, Jim Rains, Lois Welch, and O. Alan Weltzien

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  

Introduction: Toward a Postpopulist Criticism  

Part I: Does Place Matter?

1. Burning Montana: Richard Ford’s Wildlife and Regional Crisis  

Tamas Dobozy

2. All My Stories Are Here: Four Montana Poets 

Roger Dunsmore

3. West of Éire: Butte’s Irish Ethos     

Matthew L. Jockers

Part II: Women Writing Montana

4. Home on the Range: Montana Romances and Geographies of Hope   

Nancy Cook

5. Feminism and Postmodernism in the New West: Mary Blew and Montana Women’s Writing since 1990 

William W. Bevis

Part III: Gay and Lesbian Literature Under a Big Sky

6. West of Desire: Queer Ambivalence in Montana Literature 

Karl Olson

7. “Just Regular Guys”: Homophobia, the Code of the West, and Constructions of Male Identity in Thomas Savage and Annie Proulx  

O. Alan Weltzien

Part IV: Native Revisions/The Problems of History

8. “He Never Wanted to Forget It”: Contesting the Idea of History in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded 

Jim Rains

9. A Haunted Nation: Cultural Narratives and the Persistence of the Indigenous Subject in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk    

Andrea Opitz

10. “I Have Had Some Satisfactory Times”: The Yellowstone Kelly Novels of Peter Bowen    

Gregory L. Morris

Part V: Hugo-Land

11. Richard Hugo’s Montana Poems: Blue Collars, Indians, and Tough Style     

Steve Davenport

12. Semicolonial Moments: The History and Influence of the University of Montana Creative Writing Program  

Lois M. Welch

Select Bibliography of Montana Writing   

Contributors     

Index

 

Editorial Reviews

"Harrison's collection includes a range of critical perspectives that invite both the general reader and the academic scholar to reconsider the richness of Montana writing."—Linda K. Karell, Montana, the Magazine of Western History

Montana the Magazine of Western History - Linda K. Karell

"This remarkable collection of essays offers something for every reader interested in Montana literature, from the well read to newcomers to the field. . . . Editor Brady Harrison deserves thanks and praise for a job very well done."—Sue Hart, Great Plains Quarterly

Great Plains Quarterly - Sue Hart

"This remarkable collection of essays offers something for every reader interested in Montana literature, from the well read to newcomers to the field. . . . Editor Brady Harrison deserves thanks and praise for a job very well done."—Sue Hart, Great Plains Quarterly

— Sue Hart

Great Plains Quarterly

"Harrison's collection includes a range of critical perspectives that invite both the general reader and the academic scholar to reconsider the richness of Montana writing."—Linda K. Karell, Montana, the Magazine of Western History

— Linda K. Karell

Montana the Magazine of Western History

"Harrison's collection includes a range of critical perspectives that invite both the general reader and the academic scholar to reconsider the richness of Montana writing."

—Linda K. Karell, Montana, the Magazine of Western History

Montana: the Magazine of Western History