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A Place in the South Michael Branch and Daniel Philippon One ofthe things that we are told is a key attribute of southern literature is the devotion to place.... We constantiy hear this advanced as an essential characteristic of southern writing. And I agree. But what exactly does it mean? What has it meant to various southern writers? Has anyone ever really tried to see what place is made to signify in southern writing? -Louis D. Rubin Southern Literature and Southern Society: Notes on a Clouded Relationship. Place, it must be said, is inherently particular, there is no such thing as a general place. The same must also be said about nature writing: it, too, is particular; it must necessarily "take place." In Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley, American nature writing has been taking place for nearly four centuries, ever since the first setders in Jamestown recorded their thoughts about the unknown landscapes to the west. But what exactly has the idea of "place" meant to the hundreds ofwriters who followed these initial attempts to understand this place? What does "place" signify in their texts? In keeping with the notion ofparticularity, we have tried to answer this question by offering a few selected examples of how the idea of"place" has been used by some ofthe many nature writers who have taken this place in the South as their subject. What follows, therefore , is not a traditional literary history, but rather a series of illustrative moments, moments we feel may help illuminate some of the things theoften contradictory idea of "place" has meant for these writers. Michael P. Branch and DanielJ. Philippon are the editors of'The Height of Our Mountains: Nature Writing from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley, to bepublished byJohnsHopkins UniversityPress in the spring of1998. Branch is associate professor ofenvironmental literature at the University ofNevada, Reno, and Philippon is completing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia. 18 What, then, is "place," or, more properly, what are "places"? First and foremost, places are both distinctive and continuous. On the one hand, we can define the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah Valley ofVirginia in contrast to the places that surround it: it is not the tidewater or the piedmont; it is not in Maryland, North Carolina, or West Virginia; it is not that portion of northern Virginia that surrounds Washington, D.C, nor that portion ofsouthwestern Virginia that borders Kentucky and Tennessee. On the other hand, it is clearly continuous with all of these regions, sharing aspects of their natural and cultural histories, separable only in name, but never in fact. The simultaneous existence of distinctive and continuous elements in this particular place may best be revealed by the separation ofthis region from West Virginia, an event that quite literally "took place" in 1861 during the Civil War, forever changing people's perceptions of what had previously seemed a united landscape. The confusion and uncertainty created by this division is a central theme in the work of such wartime writers as Cornelia Peake McDonald, Lucy Rebecca Buck, Walt Whitman, and George Stevens, who watched the land to die north and west of die Blue Ridge region become "free soil" while the Shenandoah Valley was transformed into the "breadbasket ofthe Confederacy." This place also contains many smaller units of place-such as local watersheds; counties, cities, and towns; and parks and wildlife preservesand participates in many larger units of place that contain it or overlap with it-such as the South, Appalachia, the Middle Atlantic region, the United States, and the North American continent. Thus while the cities ofWinchester and Roanoke are both part ofthe continuous landscape of the Valley ofVirginia, the residents of Roanoke to die southwest may be more likely to consider themselves part ofAppalachia than may the residents of Winchester, which lies further northeast. Such differences of placeconsciousness are perhaps most present in narratives written by the many travelers and itinerant naturalists who journeyed through this region in the eighteenth century, but they also are the subject for such modern travelers as Jonathan Yardley, who chronicled his journey from Washington , D.C, to Chatham, Virginia, in States of...

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