Much criticism has been directed at negative stereotypes of Appalachia perpetuated by movies, television shows, and news media. Books, on the other hand, often draw enthusiastic praise for their celebration of the simplicity and authenticity of the Appalachian region. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 employs the innovative new strategy of examining fan mail, reviews, and readers’ geographic affiliations to understand how readers have imagined the region and what purposes these imagined geographies have served for them. As Emily Satterwhite traces the changing visions of Appalachia across the decades, from the Gilded Age (1865–1895) to the present, she finds that every generation has produced an audience hungry for a romantic version of Appalachia. According to Satterwhite, best-selling fiction has portrayed Appalachia as a distinctive place apart from the mainstream United States, has offered cosmopolitan white readers a sense of identity and community, and has engendered feelings of national and cultural pride. Thanks in part to readers’ faith in authors as authentic representatives of the regions they write about, Satterwhite argues, regional fiction often plays a role in creating and affirming regional identity. By mapping the geographic locations of fans, Dear Appalachia demonstrates that mobile white readers in particular, including regional elites, have idealized Appalachia as rooted, static, and protected from commercial society in order to reassure themselves that there remains an “authentic” America untouched by global currents. Investigating texts such as John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908), Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954), James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), Dear Appalachia moves beyond traditional studies of regional fiction to document the functions of these narratives in the lives of readers, revealing not only what people have thought about Appalachia, but why.

Ecocriticism and Appalachian studies continue to grow and thrive in academia, as they expand on their foundational works to move in new and exciting directions. When researching these areas separately, there is a wealth of information. However, when researching Appalachian ecocriticism specifically, the lack of consolidated scholarship is apparent. With Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place, editors Jessica Cory and Laura Wright have created the only book-length scholarly collection of Appalachian ecocriticism. Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place is a collection of scholarly essays that engage environmental and ecocritical theories and Appalachian literature and film. These essays, many from well-established Appalachian studies and southern studies scholars and ecocritics, engage with a variety of ecocritical methodologies, including ecofeminism, ecospiritualism, queer ecocriticism, and materialist ecocriticism, to name a few. Adding Appalachian voices to the larger ecocritical discourse is vital not only for the sake of increased diversity but also to allow those unfamiliar with the region and its works to better understand the Appalachian region in a critical and authentic way. Including Appalachia in the larger ecocritical community allows for the study of how the region, its issues, and its texts intersect with a variety of communities, thus allowing boundless possibilities for learning and analysis.

Appalachia faces overwhelming challenges that plague many rural areas across the country, including poorly funded schools, stagnant economic development, corrupt political systems, poverty, and drug abuse. Its citizens, in turn, have often been the target of unkind characterizations depicting them as illiterate or backward. Despite entrenched social and economic disadvantages, the region is also known for its strong sense of culture, language, and community. In this innovative volume, a multidisciplinary team of both established and rising scholars challenge Appalachian stereotypes through an examination of language and rhetoric. Together, the contributors offer a new perspective on Appalachia and its literacy, hoping to counteract essentialist or class-based arguments about the region's people, and reexamine past research in the context of researcher bias. Featuring a mix of traditional scholarship and personal narratives, Rereading Appalachia assesses a number of pressing topics, including the struggles of first-generation college students and the pressure to leave the area in search of higher-quality jobs, prejudice toward the LGBT community, and the emergence of Appalachian and Affrilachian art in urban communities. The volume also offers rich historical perspectives on issues such as the intended and unintended consequences of education activist Cora Wilson Stewart's campaign to promote literacy at the Kentucky Moonlight Schools. A call to arms for those studying the heritage and culture of Appalachia, this timely collection provides fresh perspectives on the region, its people, and their literacy beliefs and practices.

Southeastern Geographer VOLUME 54, NUMBER 1 : SPRING 2014 Table of Contents Introduction to Southeastern Geographer, Volume 54, Number 1 David M. Cochran and Carl A. Reese Part I: Papers The Great Lakes-to-Florida Highway: A Politics of Road Space in 1920s West Virginia and Virginia Jessey Gilley Do Incentives Work? An Analysis of Residential Solar Energy Adoption in Miami-Dade County, Florida Jeffery Onsted and Aileen Varela-Margolles Disaster Vulnerability of Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers: A Comparison of Texas and North Carolina Christine E. Gares and Burrell E. Montz Louisiana: Apprehending a Complex Web of Vernacular Regional Geography John McEwen Spatial Trends and Factors Associated with Hardwood Mortality in the Southeastern United States Michael Crosby, Zhaofei Fan, Theodor D. Leninger, Martin A. Spetich and A. Brady Self Part II: Reviews The Geography of Wine: How Landscapes, Cultures, Terror, and the Weather Make a Good Drop Brian J. Sommers Reviewed by David M. Cochran, Jr. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction since 1878 Emily Satterwhite Reviewed by Taulby H. Edmondson Trash Animals: How We Live with Nature's Filthy, Feral, Invasive, and Unwanted Species Kelsi Nagy and David Johnson II Reviewed by Matthew L. Fahrenbruch Southeastern Geographer is published by UNC Press for the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers (www.sedaag.org). The quarterly journal publishes the academic work of geographers and other social and physical scientists, and features peer-reviewed articles and essays that reflect sound scholarship and contain significant contributions to geographical understanding, with a special interest in work that focuses on the southeastern United States.

Known for its dramatic beauty and valuable natural resources, Appalachia has undergone significant technological, economic, political, and environmental changes in recent decades. Home to distinctive traditions and a rich cultural heritage, the area is also plagued by poverty, insufficient healthcare and education, drug addiction, and ecological devastation. This complex and controversial region has been examined by generations of scholars, activists, and civil servants -- all offering an array of perspectives on Appalachia and its people. In this innovative volume, editors William Schumann and Rebecca Adkins Fletcher assemble both scholars and nonprofit practitioners to examine how Appalachia is perceived both within and beyond its borders. Together, they investigate the region's transformation and analyze how it is currently approached as a topic of academic inquiry. Arguing that interdisciplinary and comparative place-based studies increasingly matter, the contributors investigate numerous topics, including race and gender, environmental transformation, university-community collaborations, cyber identities, fracking, contemporary activist strategies, and analyze Appalachia in the context of local-to-global change. A pathbreaking study analyzing continuity and change in the region through a global framework, Appalachia Revisited is essential reading for scholars and students as well as for policymakers, community and charitable organizers, and those involved in community development.

While Hollywood deserves its reputation for much-maligned portrayals of southern highlanders on screen, the film industry also deserves credit for a long-standing tradition of more serious and meaningful depictions of Appalachia's people. Surveying some two dozen films and the literary and historical sources from which they were adapted, John C. Inscoe argues that in the American imagination Appalachia has long represented far more than deprived and depraved hillbillies. Rather, the films he highlights serve as effective conduits into the region's past, some grounded firmly in documented realities and life stories, others only loosely so. In either case, they deserve more credit than they have received for creating sympathetic and often complex characters who interact within families, households, and communities amidst a wide array of historical contingencies. They provide credible and informative narratives that respect the specifics of the times and places in which they are set. Having used many of these movies as teaching tools in college classrooms, Inscoe demonstrates the cumulative effect of analyzing them in terms of shared themes and topics to convey far more generous insights into Appalachia and its history than one would have expected to emerge from southern California's "dream factory."

When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she would have been interested in cooking? Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?