Critical concerns

Regional fiction, though often associated with the short stories published in the highbrow magazines of the late nineteenth century, has proven to be an enduring genre in US fiction, especially for women writers who were among its first and most accomplished practitioners. Regional fiction's fortunes in the canon of US literature – that selected group of texts thought to be most important to the story that scholars tell about the nation's coherence – have been a barometer of the rise and fall of women's place in that canon. The canon debates around what constitutes great literature were in part spurred by the contemporary political and social debates about who counted in American culture, about whose opinions and knowledge could be understood as both disinterested and distinctive, about who was capable of addressing everyone in the nation while also expressing their own powerfully individualistic and autonomous point of view. In the 1970s and '80s, when feminist activists and feminist literary historians (such as Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert, Elaine Showalter, Mary Poovey, Nina Baym, Judith Fetterley, and Marjorie Pryse) recovered the work of women writers who had been consigned to the dust heap of history, they opened up the canon of US literature to perspectives that challenged the dominant narrative of how literature helped to maintain national unity and coherence, and, by doing so, they revealed a literary and cultural history in which the contests over what counted as literature, culture, and citizenship were pressing concerns for a range of writers and readers.