ABSTRACT
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff are short-story cycles linked by common recursive structures as well as pressing cultural themes. While the characters in Winesburg, Ohio struggle with moral repressiveness and incommunicable emotions that render them isolated, war trauma, dementia, drug addiction, eating disorder, child molestation, and systemic violence dominate Knockemstiff a century later. Historically a downward spiral is noticeable from the desperate respectability that characterizes the atmosphere of Winesburg to the defeatist poverty and neglect of the people in Knockemstiff. The Ohio settings of these story cycles define their regionalism but the desire for change, the instability and marginalization of their characters, also disrupt such rootedness and associate them with social disintegration and transition. In complex ways both books thus feed into current discussions of community, critical regionalism, cultural mobility, and cruel optimism.
