Elizabeth Spencer's complicated cartographies

by Catherine Seltzer

Elizabeth Spencer has published critically acclaimed fiction for over forty years. Yet in many respects, Spencer's work has existed largely on the margins of the southern canon, whose rigid boundaries cannot easily accommodate her shifting vision of--and relationship to--the South. This book looks at the ways in which Spencer's fiction has evolved in its challenges to these boundaries, questioning conventional notions of home, remapping long-established landscapes of southern identity, and challenging southern literary orthodoxies. --From cover.