Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir

Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir PDF Author: Will Brantley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston are distinctly varying and individual writers of the American South whose work is identified with the Southern Literary Renaissance. This intertextual study assesses their autobiographical writings and their intellectual stature as modern women of letters. It is the first to include these writers in the socio-history of modern southern feminism and the first to group them in the discourse of modern American liberalism." "In the confessional tract Killers of the Dream (1949, 1961) Smith's focus upon ethics, racism, and sexism rather than upon conventional southern themes sharply disrupts the ideology of conservative forces in the mainstream of southern literary criticism. In Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir dominant themes from Smith's autobiography are synthesized as other liberal feminine voices in the chorus of southern memoirs examine norms of gender, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984) center on the woman writer's inner life and demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977) define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern America. In Dust Tracks on a Road (1942, 1984) Zora Neale Hurston connects the problems of gender, region, nation, and race." "By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in southern women's autobiographical writings, Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir reconceptualizes the role of the southern woman of letters and her contributions to the literature of the modern South."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir

Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir PDF Author: Will Brantley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Lillian Smith, Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Zora Neale Hurston are distinctly varying and individual writers of the American South whose work is identified with the Southern Literary Renaissance. This intertextual study assesses their autobiographical writings and their intellectual stature as modern women of letters. It is the first to include these writers in the socio-history of modern southern feminism and the first to group them in the discourse of modern American liberalism." "In the confessional tract Killers of the Dream (1949, 1961) Smith's focus upon ethics, racism, and sexism rather than upon conventional southern themes sharply disrupts the ideology of conservative forces in the mainstream of southern literary criticism. In Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir dominant themes from Smith's autobiography are synthesized as other liberal feminine voices in the chorus of southern memoirs examine norms of gender, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984) center on the woman writer's inner life and demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977) define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern America. In Dust Tracks on a Road (1942, 1984) Zora Neale Hurston connects the problems of gender, region, nation, and race." "By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in southern women's autobiographical writings, Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir reconceptualizes the role of the southern woman of letters and her contributions to the literature of the modern South."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Southern Weave of Women

A Southern Weave of Women PDF Author: Linda Tate
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820318509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A Southern Weave of Women is one of the first sustained treatments of the generation women writers who came of age in the post-World War II South as well as one of the first to situate southern literature fully within a multicultural context

Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact

Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact PDF Author: Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820337021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
Although historians frequently use memoirs as source material, too often they confine such usage to the anecdotal, and there is little methodological literature regarding the genre’s possibilities and limitations. This study articulates an approach to using memoirs as instruments of historical understanding. Jennifer Jensen Wallach applies these principles to a body of memoirs about life in the American South during Jim Crow segregation, including works by Zora Neale Hurston, Willie Morris, Lillian Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., William Alexander Percy, and Richard Wright. Wallach argues that the field of autobiography studies, which is currently dominated by literary critics, needs a new theoretical framework that allows historians, too, to benefit from the interpretation of life writing. Her most provocative claim is that, due to the aesthetic power of literary language, skilled creative writers are uniquely positioned to capture the complexities of another time and another place. Through techniques such as metaphor and irony, memoirists collectively give their readers an empathetic understanding of life during the era of segregation. Although these reminiscences bear certain similarities, it becomes clear that the South as it was remembered by each is hardly the same place.

Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith

Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith PDF Author: Tanya Long Bennett
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496836863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Contributions by Tanya Long Bennett, David Brauer, Cameron Williams Crawford, Emily Pierce Cummins, April Conley Kilinski, Justin Mellette, and Wendy Kurant Rollins As a white woman of means living in segregated Georgia in the first half of the twentieth century, Lillian Smith (1897–1966) surprised readers with stories of mixed-race love affairs, mob attacks on “outsiders,” and young female campers exploring their sexuality. Critical Essays on the Writings of Lillian Smith tracks the evolution of Smith from a young girls’ camp director into a courageous artist who could examine controversial topics frankly and critically while preserving a lifelong connection to the north Georgia mountains and people. She did not pull punches in her portrayals of the South and refused to obsess on an idealized past. Smith took seriously the artist’s role as she saw it—to lead readers toward a better understanding of themselves and a more fulfilling existence. Smith’s perspective cut straight to the core of the neurotic behaviors she observed and participated in. To draw readers into her exploration of those behaviors, she created compelling stories, using carefully chosen literary techniques in powerful ways. With words as her medium, she drew maps of her fictionalized southern places, revealing literally and metaphorically society’s disfunctions. Through carefully crafted points of view, she offers readers an intimate glimpse into her own childhood as well as the psychological traumas that all southerners experience and help to perpetuate. Comprised of seven essays by contemporary Smith scholars, this volume explores these fascinating aspects of Smith’s writings in an attempt to fill in the picture of this charismatic figure, whose work not only was influential in her time but also is profoundly relevant to ours.

American Women Writers, 1900-1945

American Women Writers, 1900-1945 PDF Author: Laurie Champion
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313032556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Women writers have been traditionally excluded from literary canons and not until recently have scholars begun to rediscover or discover for the first time neglected women writers and their works. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 58 American women authors who wrote between 1900 and 1945. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and discusses a particular author's biography, her major works and themes, and the critical response to her writings. The entries close with extensive primary and secondary bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a list of works for further reading. The period surveyed by this reference is rich and diverse. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, two major artistic movements, occurred between 1900 and 1945, and the entries included here demonstrate the significant contributions women made to these movements. The volume as a whole strives to reflect the diversity of American culture and includes entries for African American, Native American, Mexican American, and Chinese American women. It includes well known writers such as Willa Cather and Eudora Welty, along with more neglected ones such as Anita Scott Coleman and Sui Sin Far.

The Fourth Ghost

The Fourth Ghost PDF Author: Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.

Strange and Lurid Bloom

Strange and Lurid Bloom PDF Author: Anne M. Boyle
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838639320
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Caroline Gordon, regarded as a minor figure of the Southern Renaissance, was enviviosned as a writer, sometimes as a mother, but most often as a wife to Allen Tate and as a hostess and novelist who entertained and sometimes mentored artists visiting their home in Tennessee. This critical interpretation assesses Caroline Gordon's early struggles to gain voice and respect as a writer, her tendency to explore themes of sexual and racial tension, and the strange and lurid bloom of Gordon's genius.

Lovers and Beloveds

Lovers and Beloveds PDF Author: Gary Richards
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807132462
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A challenge to traditional criticism, this engaging study demonstrates that issues of sexuality-and same-sex desire in particular-were of central importance in the literary production of the Southern Renaissance. Especially during the end of that period-approximately the 1940s and 1950s-the national literary establishment tacitly designated the South as an allowable setting for fictionalized deviancy, thus permitting southern writers tremendous freedom to explore sexual otherness. In Lovers and Beloveds, Gary Richards draws on contemporary theories of sexuality in reading the fiction of six writers of the era who accepted that potentially pejorative characterization as an opportunity: Truman Capote, William Goyen, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, and Richard Wright. Richards skillfully juxtaposes forgotten texts by those writers with canonical works to identify the complex narratives of same-sex desire. In their novels and stories, the authors consistently reimagine gender roles, centralize homoeroticism, and probe its relationship with class, race, biological sex, and southern identity. This is the first book to assess the significance of same-sex desire in a broad range of southern texts, making a crucial contribution to the study of both literature and sexuality.

Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston PDF Author: Rose P. Davis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313064911
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of 20th-century America's foremost fiction and folklore writers. Though she was criticized by some of her contemporaries, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, her works are now frequently taught in literature courses and are widely admired for their style and substance. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to the large body of work written about her in the last 75 years. Included are annotated entries for books, dissertations, and theses written about Hurston's life and literary career. The volume also looks at hundreds of articles, book chapters, conference papers, reviews, children's books, and web sites. The bibliography additionally points the reader to guides and biographical sources and to anthologies where her works are collected. Finally, an exhaustive list of works by Hurston is provided, along with a catalog of the special collections where her manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera are stored. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is one of 20th-century America's foremost fiction and folklore writers. One of the most important authors of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the first black anthropologists, she received little recognition during her lifetime. She was criticized by some of her contemporaries, including Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and her works were largely neglected until the early 1970s. Her works are now frequently taught in literature courses and are widely admired for their style and substance. Her anthropological study,IMules and Men (1935), is a pioneering examination of Voodoo and related folklore. As a novelist, she is best known as the author of Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In addition, she was a prolific journalist who contributed to the most popular magazines and newspapers of her time. Though long neglected, Hurston has become firmly established in the literary canon, and scores of books and articles have been written about her. This reference book is a comprehensive guide to the large body of work written about her in the last 75 years. Included are annotated entries for books, dissertations, and theses written about Hurston's life and literary career. The volume also looks at hundreds of articles, book chapters, conference papers, reviews, children's books, and web sites. The bibliography additionally points the reader to guides and biographical sources and to anthologies where her works are collected. Finally, an exhaustive list of works by Hurston is provided, along with a catalog of the special collections where her manuscripts, correspondence, and ephemera are stored.

General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend

General George E. Pickett in Life and Legend PDF Author: Lesley J. Gordon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807854273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A critical biography of the best known and least accurately understood Civil War general, including the legends perpetrated by his widow, LaSalle Corbell Pickett.