Raising the Dead in Denise Giardina's Appalachian Fiction

Abstract

In an unusual 2009 Books and Culture Online exchange, Denise Giardina took issue with reviewer Jennifer Holberg's complaint that Giardina's Bronte novel, Emily's Ghost, features unconvincing ghostly presences. While Giardina's strategy did flop in that book, her efforts to “raise the dead” in novels set in her native West Virginia are praiseworthy. In her Appalachian novels, Giardina revives long-gone neighbors and the communities they populated, anticipating and meeting Wendell Berry's challenge in Imagination in Place to “transcend the limits of experience of provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole.”