Postregional Fictions

Postregional Fictions PDF Author: Clare Chadd
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175749
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and skepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd’s Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001. The first monograph on the Mississippi author’s work to appear since his death, this study considers the ways in which Hannah’s novels and short stories challenge established conceptual understandings of the U.S. South. Hannah’s writing often features elements of metafiction, through which the putative sense of “southernness” his stories dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the extent to which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Such texts locate a productive terrain between the local and the global, with particular relevance for critical apprehensions of the post-South and postsouthern literature. Offering sustained close readings of selected stories, and focusing especially on Hannah’s late work, Chadd argues that his fiction reveals the region constantly shifting in a process of mythmaking, dialogue, and performance. In turn, she uses Hannah’s work to suggest how notions of the “South” and “southernness” might survive the various deconstructive approaches leveled against them in recent decades of southern studies scholarship. Rather than seeing an impasse between the regional and the global, Chadd’s reading of Hannah shows the two existing and flourishing in tandem. In Postregional Fictions, Chadd offers a new interpretation of Hannah based on an appreciation of the vital intersection of southern and postmodern elements in his work.

Postregional Fictions

Postregional Fictions PDF Author: Clare Chadd
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175749
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and skepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd’s Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001. The first monograph on the Mississippi author’s work to appear since his death, this study considers the ways in which Hannah’s novels and short stories challenge established conceptual understandings of the U.S. South. Hannah’s writing often features elements of metafiction, through which the putative sense of “southernness” his stories dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the extent to which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Such texts locate a productive terrain between the local and the global, with particular relevance for critical apprehensions of the post-South and postsouthern literature. Offering sustained close readings of selected stories, and focusing especially on Hannah’s late work, Chadd argues that his fiction reveals the region constantly shifting in a process of mythmaking, dialogue, and performance. In turn, she uses Hannah’s work to suggest how notions of the “South” and “southernness” might survive the various deconstructive approaches leveled against them in recent decades of southern studies scholarship. Rather than seeing an impasse between the regional and the global, Chadd’s reading of Hannah shows the two existing and flourishing in tandem. In Postregional Fictions, Chadd offers a new interpretation of Hannah based on an appreciation of the vital intersection of southern and postmodern elements in his work.

All Y'all

All Y'all PDF Author: Heidi Siegrist
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469682826
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The South is often perceived as a haunted place in its region's literature, one that is strange, deviant, or "queer." The peculiar, often sexually charged literary worlds of contemporary writers like Fannie Flagg, Monique Truong, and Randall Kenan speak to this connection between queerness and the South. Heidi Siegrist explores the boundaries of negotiating place and sexuality by using the concept of Southernness—a purposefully fluid idea of the South that extends beyond simple geography, eschewing familiar ideas of the Southern canon. When the connection between queerness and Southerness becomes apparent, Siegrist shows a Southern-branded queer deviance can not only change the way we think about literature but can also change Southern queer people's lived experiences. Siegrist gathers a bevy of undertheorized writers, from Kenan and Troung to Dorothy Allison and even George R. R. Martin, showing that there are many "queer Souths." Siegrist offers these multiverses as a way to appreciate a place that is often unfriendly, even deadly, to queer people. But as Siegrist argues, none of these Souths, from the terrestrial to the imaginary, would be what they are without the influence and power of queer literature.

Re-imagining the Modern American West

Re-imagining the Modern American West PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816544409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the Mississippi west to the Pacific, from border to border north and south, here is the first thorough overview of novelists, historians, and artists of the modern American West. Examining a full century of cultural-intellectual forces at work, a leading authority on the twentieth-century West brings his formidable talents to bear in this pioneering study. Richard W. Etulain divides his book into three major sections. He begins with the period from the 1890s to the 1920s, when artists and authors were inventing an idealized frontier--especially one depicting initial contacts and conflicts with new landscapes and new peoples. The second section covers the regionalists, who focused on regional (mostly geographical) characteristics that shaped distinctively "western" traits of character and institutions. The book concludes with a discussion of the postregional West from World War II to the ’90s, a period when novelists, historians, and artists stressed ethnicity, gender, and a new environmentalism as powerful forces in the formation of modern western society and culture. Etulain casts a wide net in his new study. He discusses novelists from Jack London to John Steinbeck and on to Joan Didion. He covers historians from Frederick Jackson Turner to Earl Pomeroy and Patricia Nelson Limerick, and artists from Frederic Remington and Charles Russell to Georgia O’Keeffe and R. C. Gorman. The author places emphasis on women painters and authors such as Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Judith Baca. He also stresses important works of ethnic writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Amy Tan. An intriguing survey of tendencies and trends and a well-defined profile of influences and outgrowths, this book will be valuable to students and scholars of western culture and history, American studies, and related disciplines. General readers will appreciate the book’s balanced structure and spirited writing style. All readers, whatever their level of interest, will discover the major cultural inventions of the American West over the past one hundred years.

Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955

Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955 PDF Author: Bernard A. Drew
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786474106
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Even well-meaning fiction writers of the late Jim Crow era (1900-1955) perpetuated racial stereotypes in their depiction of black characters. From 1918 to 1952, Octavus Roy Cohen turned out a remarkable 360 short stories featuring Florian Slappey and the schemers, romancers and ditzes of Birmingham's Darktown for The Saturday Evening Post and other publications. Cohen said, "I received a great deal of mail from Negroes and I have never found any resentment from a one of them." The black readership had to be satisfied with any black presence in the popular literature of the day. The best known white writers of black characters included Booth Tarkington (Herman and Verman in the Penrod books), Irvin S. Cobb (Judge Priest's houseman Jeff Poindexter), Roark Bradford (Widow Duck, the plantation matriarch), Hugh Wiley (Wildcat Marsden, the war veteran who traveled the country in the company of his goat) and Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden (radio's Amos 'n' Andy). These writers deservedly declined in the civil rights era, but left a curious legacy that deserves examination. This book, focusing on authors of series fiction and particularly of humorous stories, profiles 29 writers and their black characters in detail, with brief entries covering 72 others.

Re-imagining the Modern American West

Re-imagining the Modern American West PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816516834
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Describes changes in how the West has been seen, from a male-dominated frontier, to a region with a powerful sense of place, to a modern center of both genders, ethnic groups, and environmental interests

The American West and Its Interpreters

The American West and Its Interpreters PDF Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826364454
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Distinguished historian Richard W. Etulain brings together a generous selection of essays from his sixty-year career as a specialist on the US West in this essential volume. Each essay provides an invaluable overview of the rise of western literary history and historiography--including insightful evaluations of individual historians--revealing summaries of regional literature and discussions of western stories yet to be told. Together these writings furnish readers with useful considerations of important subjects about the American West. All those interested in the American West and its interpreters will find these illuminative moments of literary history and historiography especially appealing.

Comprehensive Dissertation Index

Comprehensive Dissertation Index PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 860

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Book Description


Reading Reconstruction

Reading Reconstruction PDF Author: Kathryn B. McKee
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170615
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849–1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works. McKee reveals conflicts in Bonner’s writing as her newfound feminism clashes with her resurgent racism, two forces widely prevalent and persistently oppositional throughout the late nineteenth century. Reading Reconstruction begins by tracing the historical contexts that defined Bonner’s life in postwar Holly Springs. McKee explores how questions of race, gender, and national citizenship permeated Bonner’s social milieu and provided subject matter for her literary works. Examining Bonner’s writing across multiple genres, McKee finds that the author’s wry but dark humor satirizes the foibles and inconsistencies of southern culture. Bonner’s travel letters, first from Boston and then from the capitals of Europe, show her both embracing and performing her role as a southern woman, before coming to see herself as simply “American” when abroad. Like unto Like, the single novel she published in her lifetime, directly engages with Mississippi’s postbellum political life, especially its racial violence and the rise of Lost Cause ideology. Her two short story collections, including the raucously comic pieces in Dialect Tales and the more nostalgic Suwanee River Tales, indicate her consistent absorption in the debates of her time, as she ponders shifting definitions of citizenship, questions the evolving rhetoric of postwar reconciliation, and readily employs humor to disrupt conventional domestic scenarios and gender roles. In the end, Bonner’s writing offers a telling index of the paradoxes and irresolution of the period, advocating for a feminist reinterpretation of traditional gender hierarchies, but verging only reluctantly on the questions of racial equality that nonetheless unsettle her plots. By challenging traditional readings of postbellum southern literature, McKee offers a long-overdue reassessment of Sherwood Bonner’s place in American literary history.

The Postregional Turn in Contemporary American Literature

The Postregional Turn in Contemporary American Literature PDF Author: Sarah I. Petrides
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780549676416
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
This study approaches regionalisms from the perspective advanced by Roberto Maria Dainotto, who suggests that regions are not places, but communities, and that these communities base their organizing ethos upon a shared notion of the past. The postregional moment, as it is defined in this study, occurs when this notion of the past and its concomitant regional ethos become untrustworthy and finally irrelevant as modes of structuring communities. The novels examined in this study consider the postregional individual's quest to replace this moribund regional identity with another ethical foundation from which to approach the construction of entirely new communities. Often, these new communities offer recompense to members of groups excluded, marginalized, or injured under the ethos of the old regionalisms. Particular attention is paid to issues of race and the postregional. Authors considered are Walker Percy, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Ernest J. Gaines, and Percival Everett.

Contested Terrain

Contested Terrain PDF Author: Keith Wilhite
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388577
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
"Drawing on a body of literature published between 1945 and 2016, Contested Terrain proposes a more expansive treatment of suburban fiction as a discourse that operates within national and transnational geographies. Wilhite argues that the suburbs and suburban narratives reflect the latest, perhaps final outpost in the tradition of U.S. regionalism. Although he may be accused of simply substituting one outmoded methodology for another, such a critique depends on misreading regionalism as either a sub-literary genre or, as Roberto Dainotto suggests, a pernicious political ideology that opposes modernity and suppresses difference in the naive pursuit of "grounded, rooted, natural, authentic values shared by a true community." In opposition to such withering appraisals, Contested Terrain demonstrates that, as both a literary discourse and a mode of geopolitical analysis, regionalism clarifies the fraught relationship between isolationism and imperialism that has shaped U.S. residential geography and, in turn, helps us rethink the role literary texts play in the postwar project of suburban nation building"--