Postregional Fictions

In Postregional Fictions, Clare Chadd skilfully blends close readings of Barry Hannah’s fiction with a sustained meditation on the current state of, and future prospects for, southern studies.
In her thoughtful and provocative analysis, Chadd reveals how Hannah’s manipulation of language, characters, and themes traditionally associated with canonical southern literature actually constitutes a subversive critique of widely discredited notions of regional exceptionalism built on unhealthy white male nostalgia for a mythical southern past. Yet she also shows how Hannah’s work is grounded in the powerful historical forces and material conditions responsible for a wide variety of fluid, contingent, vexed and yet still somehow discernibly southern identities. Thus Chadd presents Hannah’s fiction as a means to navigate and reconcile tensions between crude old notions of southern distinctiveness and a newer theories of postregionalism that, in their most extreme form, might deny the existence of the South as a useful category of analysis altogether.
This is an important book for anyone interested in Barry Hannah, southern studies, and modern US literature and cultural theory.

~Brian Ward

Clare Chadd’s Postregional Fictions: Barry Hannah and the Challenges of Southern Studies is a welcome arrival, in more ways than one. The first monograph focused on Hannah in over twenty years (and since Hannah’s death a decade ago), Postregional Fictions combines detailed, convincing analyses of Hannah’s fiction with an impressive ability to locate that work amid larger critical debates about modernism, postmodernism, and regionalism. Chadd’s compelling readings of Hannah also challenge key tenets of the new southern studies. ~Martyn Bone