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The first book-length examination of the award-winning author of poetry and fiction firmly rooted in Appalachia

Since his dramatic appearance on the southern literary stage with his debut novel, One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash has continued a prolific outpouring of award-winning poetry and fiction. His status as a regular on the New York Times Best Sellers list, coupled with his impressive critical acclaim—including two O. Henry Awards and the Frank O'Connor Award for Best International Short Fiction—attests to both his wide readership and his brilliance as a literary craftsman. In Summoning the Dead, editors Randall Wilhelm and Zackary Vernon have assembled the first book-length collection of scholarship on Ron Rash. The volume features the work of respected scholars in southern and Appalachian studies, providing a disparate but related constellation of interdisciplinary approaches to Rash's fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

The editors contend that Rash's work is increasingly relevant and important on regional, national, and global levels in part because of its popular and scholarly appeal and also its invaluable social critiques and celebrations, thus warranting academic attention. Wilhelm and Vernon argue that studying Rash is important because he encourages readers and critics alike to understand Appalachia in all its complexity and he consistently provides portrayals of the region that reveal both the beauty of its cultures and landscapes as well as the social and environmental pathologies that it continues to face.

The landscapes, peoples, and cultures that emerge in Rash's work represent and respond to not only Appalachia or the South, but also to national and global cultures. Firmly rooted in the mountain South, Rash's artistic vision weaves the truths of the human condition and the perils of the human heart in a poetic language that speaks deeply to us all. Through these essays, offering a range of critical and theoretical approaches that examine important aspects of Rash's work, Wilhelm and Vernon create a foundation for the future of Rash studies.

Robert Morgan, Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University and author of fourteen books of poetry and nine volumes of fiction including the New York Times bestselling novel Gap Creek, provides a foreword.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title Page, Copyright, Epigraph
  2. pp. i-vi
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-x
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  1. Foreword
  2. Robert Morgan
  3. pp. xi-xiv
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. xv-xvi
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  1. Introduction: The Hum of Resurrection—Raising Rash to Critical Light
  2. pp. 1-10
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  1. PART I: THE NATURAL WORLD
  1. Strange Agrarianisms: Transmutations of I’ll Take My Stand in James Dickey’s Deliverance and Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden
  2. Zackary Vernon
  3. pp. 13-25
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  1. “Like a dam broke open”: Water and Narrative in Ron Rash’s One Foot in Eden
  2. Frédérique Spill
  3. pp. 26-39
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  1. The Single Effect of Ron Rash’s Environmental Vision
  2. Brian Railsback
  3. pp. 40-51
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  1. Fierce Ghosts, Strange Shadows: Reading Ron Rash’s Extinct and Endangered Species through Flannery O’Connor
  2. Jimmy Dean Smith
  3. pp. 52-65
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  1. "A comfort during a hard time”: Food in Ron Rash’s Poems, Short Stories, and Novels
  2. Erica Abrams Locklear
  3. pp. 66-80
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  1. PART II: INTERTEXTUAL STREAMS
  1. “A boxed and stilled forever”: Vision, Death, and Affect in the Work of Ron Rash
  2. Randall Wilhelm
  3. pp. 83-98
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  1. “Awake in their wide pasture”: Formal Design in the Poems of Robert Morgan and Ron Rash
  2. Jesse Graves
  3. pp. 99-110
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  1. Ron Rash and Eudora Welty: Walking the Same Worn Path
  2. Mae Miller Claxton
  3. pp. 111-121
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  1. The Christ-Abandoned Landscape of Rash’s Nothing Gold Can Stay
  2. Martha Greene Eads
  3. pp. 122-136
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  1. “Beyond gender”: Subversion and the Creation of Chaos in Serena and Macbeth
  2. Barbara Bennett
  3. pp. 137-147
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  1. Rash’s Shakespearean Ecologies: Autopoietic and Allopoietic Remediations of Macbeth in Serena
  2. Tripthi Pillai and Daniel Cross Turner
  3. pp. 148-164
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  1. PART III: WAR, MEMORY, VIOLENCE
  1. The Civil War and Beyond in Appalachia: A Historiographical Essay
  2. Adam J. Pratt
  3. pp. 167-177
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  1. "I am haunted still”: The Shelton Laurel Massacre in Ron Rash’s Work
  2. John Lang
  3. pp. 178-190
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  1. The Devil at the Bottom: Southern Honor Culture in the Novels of Ron Rash
  2. Edward J. Whitelock
  3. pp. 191-204
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  1. A Hun on the Loose: World War I and The Cove
  2. Thomas Ærvold Bjerre
  3. pp. 205-217
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  1. Subalterns in the Hollers: Postcolonial Appalachia in Ron Rash’s Serena and The World Made Straight
  2. James Eric Ensley
  3. pp. 218-232
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 233-236
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 237-243
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