University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers -- Department of English English, Department of March 2003 The Politics of Cather’s Regionalism: Margins, Centers and the Nebraskan Commonwealth Guy Reynolds University of Nebraska-Lincoln,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishtalks Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Reynolds, Guy, "The Politics of Cather’s Regionalism: Margins, Centers and the Nebraskan Commonwealth" (2003). Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers -- Department of English. 1. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishtalks/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Presentations, Talks, and Seminar Papers -- Department of English by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Reynolds, The Politics of Cather’s Regionalism The Politics of Cather’s Regionalism: It features, of course, as this region often does in expatriate US writing: as everything you want to get away from. Here, the ‘dis‐ Margins, Centers and the Nebraskan quietingly cheerful horde’ represent a hideous uniformity, a col‐ Commonwealth lectivised national identity which seems both coarse and bland. This is, sadly, one of the main themes in the literary representa‐ tion of this particular region over the last century. In his useful Guy Reynolds study, The Middle West: Its Meaning in American Culture, Kansas geographer James Shortridge follows the rise and fall of the area’s Presented March 25, 2003, at the Plains Humanities Alliance Research & status in the national imagination.