SOURCE: Krasteva, Yonka. “The South and The West in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.” Southern Literary Journal 26, no. 2 (spring 1994): 77–90.

In the following essay, Krasteva maintains that while In Country takes place in an American South changed by urban life and pop culture, Mason does not strip her fictional world of the tenets of Southern tradition and community.

It has often been suggested that the New South emerged after the two World Wars, and after World War II in particular, when its regional isolation diminished and its presence in the political life of the country began to be felt with Jimmy Carter's election as president. It can be argued that the war in Vietnam had a similar impact upon the South. Referring to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, Irene, the mother of the heroine in In Country, tells her daughter: “It was country boys. When you get to that memorial...