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1980s and 1990s) entanglement of the domestic and the foreign.
The traditional notion of the region has been challenged and
supplanted by more relevant global geographic formations. For
instance, Tom Lutz’s
Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism
and Literary Value
(2004) emphasizes the “cosmopolitan openness”
that characterizes regional literature. In
Writing Out of Place:
Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture
(2005),
Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse approach regionalism through
the lens of feminism, and provide us with an alternative vantage
point from which to consider questions of regionalism in a global
setting. Philip Joseph’s
American Literary Regionalism in a Global
Age
(2007) is another endeavor to bridge regionalism and
cosmopolitanism. Examining the works of Hamlin Garland, Sarah
Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner
and others, Joseph argues that these regionalist writers
demonstrate regionalism’s “interlocutory potential” and its
capacity to engage actively with external cultural worlds other than
the one of origin. Harilaos Stecopoulos’s book,
Reconstructing the
World
(2008), calls for a new “post-nationalist” and “post-
regionalist” study of U.S. empire. These post-regionalist American
studies inform much of this paper, which benefits a great deal from
these scholars’ expanding and illuminating readings of questions of
regions and regionalism. Although Stecopoulos, in Chapter Four of
Reconstructing the World
, reads McCullers’s military fictions as a
critique of American empire from a regional perspective, he
devotes most of the chapter to an examination of
The Member of
the Wedding
. Like Stecopoulos, I emphasize the relationship of the
U.S. South and the U.S. empire; indeed, my in-depth analysis of
Reflections in a Golden Eye
complements Stecopoulos’s reading of
McCullers’s military themes, in which
Reflections
is mentioned
merely in passing.
Therefore, this paper will focus on McCullers’s second novel,
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, a strange tale that received accusations