Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

Indeed, a revisionist impulse has infused western literary studies for some time. As SueEllen Campbell notes, contemporary western literary criticism has been marked by:

Revisionist paradigms that aim to rethink the significance of western texts from a variety of standpoints have gained prominence in western literary criticism.

Yet while revisionism is playing a larger role in literary studies, the tendency to isolate race, class, gender, and environmental issues within separate fields precludes an understanding of their interrelationships within the context of western regionalism. Western literary critics identify differing reasons for the marginalization of regional studies and western regional writing from the American literary canon, including a common association of “regional” with an antimodern realism that seems out of touch with the postmodern and multicultural approaches dominating literary studies. Regionalism languished in the 1960s, when it became aligned with “conservative literary nationalisms” (Comer, Landscapes 1) and nostalgia for rural places. In light of these debates, I situate western regionalism in postmodern and postcolonial contexts.¹¹ In doing so, I develop Krista Comer‘s notion that “a resistant politics can in fact be tied to particularized place without capitulating to nostalgia or antimodernism” (Landscapes 15). Analyzing the intersections between postmodern strategies and regional stories complicates associations of western writing with antimodern realism and isolationist assumptions.