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Caught between genres as both a novel and a collection of stories, hovering between a regionalist claim and a nationalist plot, The Country of the Pointed Firs, the most local of local texts, has, oddly enough, long proven “out of place”, stubbornly resisting the categories in which critics have placed it. Eschewing such a compulsary categorization, this article focuses on the constant dialogue, within the text, between two narrative postures: appropriation—the temptation to impose, from the exterior, a traditional, linear plot upon the country—and belonging, a desire to be one with the country which allows the country’s design to emerge from within. However, this counter-plot is not so much a transformation of the country of the pointed firs into a “region” (i.e. into the very site of the critical, of counter-hegemony), as an attempt to “regionalize” the very concept of nation, reversing the point of view from which the nation is created by rooting it in the region itself. In its design as well as in its intention, then, Jewett’s text subverts the very categories upon which it rests—country, nation, region.