The seventeen authors who have contributed critical essays to this collection include three well-known regional scholars, Jesse Graves, Erica Abrams Locklear, and John Lang. as well as academics from regional Universities, Western Carolina, Eastern Mennonite, and Appalachian State as well as Union College and from European universities in Denmark and France. Here you will find Ron Rash compared and contrasted with the Southern Agrarians, James Dickey, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Morgan, Eudora Welty, and William Shakespeare. And you will learn about the role of the Civil War, food, gender and ecology in Ron Rash’s literary work. “Ron Rash has become one of the most important Appalachian writers. This collection will establish the terms for discussing Rash’s work for the next generation of readers.” – David A. Davis. “Over the past fifteen years, Ron Rash has become not just a great writer, but one of a tiny handful of artists indispensable to our understanding not only of Appalachia, but to all of America. In Summoning the Dead, Wilhelm and Vernon have assembled a brilliantly illuminating skeleton key to Rash’s work” – Mark Powell. Randall Wilhelm teaches English at Anderson University. This is his second book about the work of Ron Rash. Zackary Vernon teaches English at Appalachian State University.
Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 243 pages with an Index and a Foreword by Robert Morgan. Hardback with pictorial cover