Southern Literary Studies

Southern Literary Studies PDF Author: Charles Alphonso Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In this collection, a southerner of high scholarly distinction and wide personal influence, discourses wisely and charmingly on the Americanism of American literature, on Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Jefferson, O. Henry, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and on various aspects of literature in the South. A bibliography of the writings of C. Alphonso Smith is included. Originally published in 1927. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Southern Literary Studies

Southern Literary Studies PDF Author: Charles Alphonso Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this collection, a southerner of high scholarly distinction and wide personal influence, discourses wisely and charmingly on the Americanism of American literature, on Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Jefferson, O. Henry, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and on various aspects of literature in the South. A bibliography of the writings of C. Alphonso Smith is included. Originally published in 1927. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction PDF Author: Martyn Bone
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.

Composing Selves

Composing Selves PDF Author: Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807139769
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
In Composing Selves, award-winning author Peggy Whitman Prenshaw provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen women authors. Composing Selves travels the wide terrain of female life in the South, analyzing various issues that range from racial consciousness to the deflection of personal achievement. All of the authors presented came of age during the era Prenshaw refers to as the "late southern Victorian period," which began in 1861 and ended in the 1930s. Belle Kearney's A Slaveholder's Daughter (1900) with Elizabeth Spencer's Landscapes of the Heart and Ellen Douglas's Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell (both published in 1998) chronologically bookend Prenshaw's survey. She includes Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, Bernice Kelly Harris's Southern Savory, and Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road. The book also examines Katharine DuPre Lumpkin's The Making of a Southerner and Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream. In addition to exploring multiple themes, Prenshaw considers a number of types of autobiographies, such as Helen Keller's classic The Story of My Life and Anne Walter Fearn's My Days of Strength. She treats narratives of marital identity, as in Mary Hamilton's Trials of the Earth, and calls attention to works by women who devoted their lives to social and political movements, like Virginia Durr's Outside the Magic Circle. Drawing on many notable authors and on Prenshaw's own life of scholarship, Composing Selves provides an invaluable contribution to the study of southern literature, autobiography, and the work of southern women writers.

South to A New Place

South to A New Place PDF Author: Suzanne W. Jones
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807128404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

The History of Southern Women's Literature

The History of Southern Women's Literature PDF Author: Carolyn Perry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807127537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television

Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television PDF Author: Deborah E. Barker
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807171654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, & Television, edited by Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey, examines the often-overlooked and undervalued impact of the U.S. South on the origins and development of the detective genre and film noir. This wide-ranging collection engages with ongoing discussions about genre, gender, social justice, critical race theory, popular culture, cinema, and mass media. Focusing on the South, these essays uncover three frequently interrelated themes: the acknowledgment of race as it relates to slavery, segregation, and discrimination; the role of land as a source of income, an ecologically threatened space, or a place of seclusion; and the continued presence of the southern gothic in recurring elements such as dilapidated plantation houses, swamps, family secrets, and the occult. Twenty-two critical essays probe how southern detective narratives intersect with popular genre forms such as neo-noir, hard-boiled fiction, the dark thriller, suburban noir, amateur sleuths, journalist detectives, and television police procedurals. Alongside essays by scholars, Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television presents pieces by authors of detective and crime fiction, including Megan Abbott and Ace Atkins, who address the extent to which the South and its artistic traditions influenced their own works. By considering the diversity of authors and characters associated with the genre, this accessible collection provides an overdue examination of the historical, political, and aesthetic contexts out of which the southern detective narrative emerged and continues to evolve.

Serpent in Eden

Serpent in Eden PDF Author: Fred Hobson
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807104552
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The appearance in 1920 of H. L. Mencken's scathing essay about the intellectual and cultural impoverishment of the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart, " set off a firestorm of reaction in the region that continued unabated for much of the next decade. In Serpent in Eden, Mencken scholar Fred Hobson examines Mencken's love-hate relationship with the South. He explores not only Mencken's savage criticism of the region but also his efforts to encourage southern writers and the bold "little magazines, " such as the Reviewer and the Double Dealer, that started up in the South during the 1920s.

Swamp Souths

Swamp Souths PDF Author: Kirstin L. Squint
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States—the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp—this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both local and global scales. Across seventeen scholarly essays, along with a critical introduction and afterword, Swamp Souths introduces new frameworks for thinking about swamps in the South and beyond, with an emphasis on subjects including Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, intersectional feminism, and the tropical sublime. The volume analyzes canonical writers such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, but it also investigates contemporary literary works by Randall Kenan and Karen Russell, the films Beasts of the Southern Wild and My Louisiana Love, and music ranging from swamp rock and zydeco to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Navigating a complex assemblage of places and ecosystems, the contributors argue with passion and critical rigor for considering anew the literary and cultural work that swamps do. This dynamic collection of scholarship proves that swampy approaches to southern spaces possess increased relevance in an era of climate change and political crisis.

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.

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community

The Narrative Forms of Southern Community PDF Author: Scott Romine
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807140444
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The Narrative Forms of Southern Community contains close readings of five narratives - Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia, William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, and William Faulkner's Light in August - that attempt to mediate or negotiate the social tensions inherent in the stratified world they represent."--BOOK JACKET.