“Knowing Our Place”: Reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Works from a Bioregional Perspective

Abstract

In her non-fiction and Appalachian fiction, Barbara Kingsolver uses “place as the filter” to represent human-place interaction and her perception of “place-attachment” in the context of the global environmental crises. This article examines her works through the perspective of bioregionalism to foreground the transition from local to global, merging Kingsolver’s bioregional thinking, living, and the narratives of places. Her works focus on place-specific issues of a bioregion and connect with what Heise calls “a variety of ecological imaginations of the global” (Heise 2008). The paper devotes attention to Kingsolver’s works and the theoretical perspective of bioregionalism based on the “four” waves of ecocriticism.