The panel found much to admire in this thoughtful, humane and reflexive discussion of the continuing relevance of local/regional fiction. It calls readers to appreciate the many connections between place, nation and the world in works of 'local color' and for them to see the relevance of those linkages for shifting conceptions of race, class, gender and nationality. Examining the 'entanglement' of place and time and power, and the politics and place of knowledge
production, it is an important book for our Trump/Brexit-dominated times.
June Howard earned her B.A. at Antioch College and her Ph.D. from the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. She is on the faculty of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she holds appointments in English, American Culture, and Women's Studies. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States, and also addresses broad questions about the social life of
reading and the production of knowledge. Her previous books are Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, an edited volume of essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, and Publishing the Family—a microhistory that takes the serial publication in Harper's Bazar of a collaborative novel by twelve authors,
including Henry James and Mary Wilkins Freeman, as a window into the year 1908 and the 'public/private' binary as constitutive of modernity.