Say "New England" and you likely conjure up an image in the mind of your listener: the snowy woods or stone wall of a Robert Frost poem, perhaps, or that quintessential icon of the region--the idyllic white village. Such images remind us that, as Joseph Conforti notes, a region is not just a territory on the ground. It is also a place in the imagination. This ambitious work investigates New England as a cultural invention, tracing the region's changing identity across more than three centuries. Incorporating insights from history, literature, art, material culture, and geography, it shows how succeeding generations of New Englanders created and broadcast a powerful collective identity for their region through narratives about its past. Whether these stories were told in the writings of Frost or Harriet Beecher Stowe, enacted in historical pageants or at colonial revival museums, or conveyed in the pages of a geography textbook or Yankee magazine, New Englanders used them to sustain their identity, revising them as needed to respond to the shifting regional landscape.

The only comprehensive study of Portland s history, culture, and people."

O'Connell (English, U. of Mass., Boston) discusses not only the familiar Boston/Cambridge/Concord literary figures (from Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne to Updike, Cheever and Robert Lowell) but also authors of other roots and regions, including Edwin O'Connor, WEB Dubois, John Greenleaf Whittier, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Argues that the adaptation of habitus for a universal audience supported the development of a vernacular reading public.

In 1726, an illiterate woman from Surrey named Mary Toft announced that she had given birth to 17 rabbits. This study recreates the story of this incident and shows how it illuminates 18th-century beliefs about the power of imagination and the problems of personal identity.

When this memoirist, his girlfriend, and her son move into a New Hampshire farm that needs love and care, fixing it up becomes an art form.