Midwestern Literature

This volume in the Critical Insights series presents a variety of new essays on the genre that covers 12 states in the center of the country --Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota.For readers who are studying it for the first time, several essays survey the critical conversation regarding midwestern literature, explore its cultural and historical contexts and offer close and comparative reading of key texts in the genre. Readers seeking a deeper understanding of midwestern literature can then move on to other essays that explore it in depth through a variety of critical approaches. Works that may be discussed include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Winter Dreams, Garrison Keillor’s Home, and Saul Bellow’s Looking for Mr. Green.

Rounding out the volume are a list of literary works that are not discussed in the book that concern the theme as well as a bibliography of critical sources for readers seeking to study this theme in greater depth.

Salem's Critical Insights series distils the best of both classic and current literary criticism of the world's most-studied literature. The series focuses on an individual author's entire body of work, on single works of literature or on a literary theme. Edited and written by some of academe's most distinguished literary scholars, Critical Insights provide authoritative, in-depth scholarship suitable for students and teachers alike.