Lost in the City: An Exploration of Edward P. Jones’s Short Fiction

February 25, 2019

URL: https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/books/pww/catalog/book/10

Published by Publishing Without Walls (PWW), Urbana, Ill., part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network

Merging the best of distant and close reading, Kenton Rambsy and Peace Ossom-Williamson lead a stunning digital investigation of space and narrative in the short fiction of Edward P. Jones. This edited collection contains essays from graduate students enrolled in a literature seminar at the University of Texas at Arlington. Collectively, they examine Jones’s practice of “literary geo-tagging” to show how this master of literary prose delves into a remembered Washington, DC where the city’s African American population finds itself at the precipice of the gentrification and displacement that would lead to today’s very different city. Caught in this moment, the characters negotiate regional identities and generational conflicts. Exploring Jones’s fiction from Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the authors of this collection’s investigations employ mapping and data visualization methods that make novel contributions to critical methods for literary study even as they establish how Jones embeds DC’s geography in his texts.