Fen Blows: a short story collection and exegesis examining regionalism in 21st century short story collections

My PhD comprises a collection of original short stories, Fen Blows, and an exegesis in which I examine a range of twenty-first century short story collections, each with a commonality of setting. In identifying a common aesthetic in these contemporary collections, showing how themes of circumscription, marginalised, often youthful, characters and socioeconomic deprivation all predominate, I propose the term ‘millennium regionalism’.

The fourteen stories that comprise Fen Blows are all set in the same Cambridgeshire village, close to the river Great Ouse. Influenced by my reading of millennium regionalist collections, they not only share the same aesthetic and many of the tropes I identify and discuss in the first two chapters of the exegesis, but also subvert a number of those tropes by featuring some characters who are not necessarily on the fringes of society, or in straitened economic circumstances, or have no hope of escape. My collection therefore offers a contemporary portrait of a south Cambridgeshire village to sit alongside other millennium regionalist collections that provide aesthetically similar, but nonetheless unique, portraits of places as diverse as Caerphilly, Western Australia, Michigan, Florida and Rio’s favelas.

The exegesis opens by suggesting a growth in regionalist short story collections since 2000 and proposing the term ‘millennium regionalism’ to link, what I propose is, their shared aesthetic. I discuss the origins of regionalist literature and its nineteenth-century roots in American ‘local color’ writing, before focussing on, and examining, exemplar stories from a variety of contemporary collections from around the world, highlighting common themes and tropes. I go on to closely analyse three discrete regionalist story collections, selected to illustrate the global spread and variety of the form in the twenty-first century. I conclude by examining my own creative process, contextualising my stories and proposing Fen Blows as an original example of a millennium regionalist short story collection.