Southern Literature of the Reconstruction, in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism

Southern Literature of the Reconstruction, in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 82

Get Book Here

Book Description

Southern Literature of the Reconstruction, in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism

Southern Literature of the Reconstruction, in Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 82

Get Book Here

Book Description


Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature

Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature PDF Author: J. V. Ridgely
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813194989
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Get Book Here

Book Description
Few inhabitants of the South in 1800 thought of it as a "region" or of themselves as "southerners." In time, the need to defend the entire southern way of life became obsessive for many writers, too often precluding efforts at originality in form or style. Especially after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, southern identity and southern nationalism emerged as the grand themes, and literature became subservient to regional interests. The devastation of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, instead of pointing southern writers in new directions, only intensified their preoccupation with a now-dead past. The popular genres of the time—historical romance and "local color" writing—became tools to voice this preoccupation and have been important influences on America's view of the South and on American literature in general. The myth of the idyllic plantation South has had an extraordinary pervasiveness in the American consciousness. J.V. Ridgely speculates on the ways in which this tarnished but durable myth helped to produce the powerful Southern Renascence of the twentieth century in this concise survey of the literature of America's most distinctive region during a crucial formative period.

Reading Reconstruction

Reading Reconstruction PDF Author: Kathryn B. McKee
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170526
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

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.

Southern Literature From 1579-1895

Southern Literature From 1579-1895 PDF Author: Louise Manly
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781020732188
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Southern Literature is a comprehensive guide to the literature of the American South from the colonial period to the late 19th century. It includes reviews, analysis, and excerpts of notable works of fiction and non-fiction. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the literary history of the American South and its cultural heritage. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Southern Literary Criticism of Four Nineteenth Century English Novelists

Southern Literary Criticism of Four Nineteenth Century English Novelists PDF Author: Linwood Elliott Herrington
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Southern literary messenger
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Edge of the Swamp

The Edge of the Swamp PDF Author: Louis D. Rubin, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807153648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Get Book Here

Book Description
The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.

Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism

Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism PDF Author: Russel Whitaker
Publisher: Nineteenth-Century Literature
ISBN: 9780787686369
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 520

Get Book Here

Book Description
Presents literary criticism on the works of nineteenth-century writers of all genres, nations, and cultures. Critical essays are selected from leading sources, including published journals, magazines, books, reviews, diaries, broadsheets, pamphlets, and scholarly papers. Criticism includes early views from the author's lifetime as well as later views, including extensive collections of contemporary analysis.

Placing the South

Placing the South PDF Author: Michael O'Brien
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578069347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
Placing the South offers a selection of work published between 1985 and 2005 by one of the most incisive historians and literary critics of the South. The pieces seek to situate the South in a variety of contexts and offer a compelling defense of what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called "rooted cosmopolitanism." This is a mode of understanding based on respect for what is local and an awareness that regionalism is not enough. Hybridity, in both culture and literature, is inescapable and desirable. The first section of the book ("Placing") contains three comparative analyses that look at how regionalism has recently been conceptualized globally, how the modern South has acquired pertinence for those outside the United States, and how the relationship between Britain and the South has worked. The second section ("Ideologies") scrutinizes political ideas--freedom, imperialism, nationalism, racial ideology--which have transformed American discourse. The third section ("Forms") examines genre and how the South has been constructed and reconstructed by such literary forms as autobiography, biography, history, and literary history. The final section ("Writers") contains critical appreciations of political thinkers, novelists, poets, critics, historians, and sociologists important to southern intellectual life. Taken together, the essays offer a robust analysis of a dynamic region. Michael O'Brien is professor of American intellectual history at University of Cambridge and a fellow at Jesus College. He is the author of Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 and other books.

Upon Provincialism

Upon Provincialism PDF Author: Bill Hardwig
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813934060
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on tourist literature, travelogues, and local-color fiction about the South, Bill Hardwig tracks the ways in which the nation's leading interdisciplinary periodicals, especially the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the Century, translated and broadcast the predominant narratives about the late-nineteenth-century South. In many ways, he attests, the national representation of the South was controlled more firmly by periodical editors working in the Northeast, such as William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Richard Watson Gilder, than by writers living in and writing about the region. Fears about national unity, immigration, industrialization, and racial dynamics in the South could be explored through the safe and displaced realm of a regional literature that was often seen as mere entertainment or as a picturesque depiction of quaint rural life. The author examines in depth the short work of George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lafcadio Hearn, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Thomas Nelson Page in the context of the larger periodical investment in the South. Arguing that this local-color fiction calls into question some of the lines of demarcation within U.S. and southern literary and cultural studies, especially those offered by identity-based models, Hardwig returns these writers to the dynamic cultural exchanges within local-color fiction from which they initially emerged.

Black Women in New South Literature and Culture

Black Women in New South Literature and Culture PDF Author: Sherita L. Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135244464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book focuses on the profound impact that racism had on the literary imagination of black Americans in the South. Sherita L. Johnson argues that it is impossible to consider what the "South" and what "southernness" mean without looking at how black women have contributed to and contested any unified definition of that region.