The Secret Country: Decoding Jayne Anne Phillips' Cryptic Fiction

by Sarah Robertson

In this first monograph on the American novelist Jayne Anne Phillips, Robertson (no affiliation given) demonstrates the importance of Phillips' place within the southern literary canon by identifying the echoes of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter and Edgar Allan Poe that permeate her work. Using psychoanalytical and historical materialist approaches, Robertson explores Phillips' attachments to a regional past and explains her thoughts about contemporary society. Robertson traces the family dynamics in Phillips' work from the turn of the 20th century to the present as representations of Phillips' reactions to growing capitalization and modernization. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

297 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007