The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.

“A Mix of Mineral and Grease”

Gerard Manley Hopkins has had a pervasive influence on contemporary Appalachian poets, rooted in such early twentieth century authors as Elizabeth Madox Roberts and continued into the new century by poets and novelists such as Robert Morgan, Jane Hicks, Ron Rash, Maurice Manning, Melissa Range, and Rose McLarney. Hopkins’s work has challenged these writers “to see the interconnectedness of their subjects, inviting them to explore and manipulate language in inventive, surprising fashion, and eliciting from them forthright self-examination of their sense of self, place, and spirit.”

Beyond the Hills, 1935–1940

By 1935, Still had established a place for himself in Knott County, Kentucky. This chapter tells of his travels beyond the county to attend writers workshops in North Carolina (Blowing Rock), Vermont (Breadloaf), New Hampshire (MacDowell), and New York (Yaddo). His experiences connected him with a world of writers. Key figures who became friends and supporters were Edwin Grover, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Robert Francis, Joy Davidman, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Delmore Schwartz, Katherine Ann Porter and a couple closer to home James Stokely and Wilma Dykeman.