The Female Tradition in Southern Literature

The Female Tradition in Southern Literature PDF Author: Carol S. Manning
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252064449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.

The Female Tradition in Southern Literature

The Female Tradition in Southern Literature PDF Author: Carol S. Manning
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252064449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.

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.

Southern Women Writers

Southern Women Writers PDF Author: Tonette Bond Inge
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Essays on contemporary women writers of the South: Margaret Walker, Mary Lee Settle, Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, Joan Williams, Maya Angelou, Shirley Ann Grau, Doris Betts, Sonia Sanchez, Gail Godwin, Sylvia Wilkinson, Anne Tyler, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Lee Smith.

Southern Mothers

Southern Mothers PDF Author: Nagueyalti Warren
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807125083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Southern Mothers, a collection of critical essays by prominent southern literary scholars, examines the significance of motherhood in southern fiction. The belle, the mammy, religion, and racism are several of the distinctive threads with which southern women writers have woven the fabric of their stories. Bringing southern motherhood into focus -- with all its peculiarities of attitude and tradition -- the essays speak to both the established and the unconventional modes of motherhood that are typical in southern writing and probe the extent to which southern women writers have rejected or embraced, supported or challenged the individual, social, and cultural understanding and institution of motherhood.

Dirt and Desire

Dirt and Desire PDF Author: Patricia Yaeger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226944921
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Making a Stand

Making a Stand PDF Author: Emily Watkins Allen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
The South has undergone much political and economic change throughout the twentieth century, but surprisingly, social expectations have to a certain extent maintained traditional gender roles. Six novels published since the Southern Renaissance document the conflict of tradition with personal strength: Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind, Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit, The Annunciation by Ellen Gilchrist, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker. White women are presented as Southern belles, while black women, largely as a result of white expectations, also remain subject to nineteenth century social values. The ideal black slave was a stereotype of the devoted child, caring, naive, but inherently stupid. White women are encouraged towards those characteristics deemed attractive to men---charm, beauty, social respectability, and the ability to bear and raise progeny. This expectation of sexuality also leads to suspicion: the Madonna-whore dichotomy emerges for white women, and black women are on one hand expected to bear children, and on the other held to white society's concern for chastity and personal reputation. The Southern belle remains a symbol of the region; therefore, a study of Southern social expectations since the Civil War reflects the changes it has undergone. While the white woman is still subject to these values, and has traditionally been presented as victimized by them, there is a theme in modern Southern literature of personal exploration and awakening despite the restrictive values of the dominant society. Black woman too attempt to create a new image of the feminine ideal by living by opposite values. These characteristics of intelligence independence, courage, determination and drive are not "normal" for Southern women, and to a certain extent must be learned or relearned in any quest for identity and personal strength. Living in spite of society's insistence that women remain submissive demands the repudiation of certain aspects of the South's culture. The experience of the individual determines the lengths to which these women go to make personal stands. Some women choose to rebel against the South within the South while others physically move away from undesirable cultural influences altogether; those that move away do not, however, instantly become free of their past.

The Companion to Southern Literature

The Companion to Southern Literature PDF Author: Joseph M. Flora
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807126929
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1096

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Book Description
Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge. Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents — alphabetical and subject — and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

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

Southern Women's Fiction, 1980-1990

Southern Women's Fiction, 1980-1990 PDF Author: Linda Kay Tate
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description


Women of Letters, the Southern Renaissance, and a Literature of Self-definition

Women of Letters, the Southern Renaissance, and a Literature of Self-definition PDF Author: William Oliver Brantley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
This dissertation provides an intertextual examination of selected nonfiction prose by six women writers of the Southern Renaissance. It situates their self-writing within a context of Southern feminism and the more inclusive discourse of modern American liberalism. Chapter One defines the socio-historical role of the "woman of letters" in the twentieth-century South, while Chapter Two explores the ways in which her work has been marginalized by recent intellectual histories. Chapter Three explains the significance of Lillian Smith's confessional tract, Killers of the Dream (1949; revised in 1961). Smith represents a sharp disruption of a conservative critical agenda that has dominated most appraisals of twentieth-century Southern writing. Smith's ethics, her analyses of women and autobiography, racism and sexism, provide useful points of reference for examining the other writers in this study, each of whom speaks with her own voice of dissent regarding gender norms, problems of race, and patriarchal power structures. The remaining chapters focus on connections between specific texts. Chapter Three defines the achievement of Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within (1954) and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings (1984), two autobiographies which center on the woman writer's inner life and which demonstrate the legitimacy of making this life the object of public attention. Chapter Four explores the ethical and political positions of Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time (1976) and Katherine Anne Porter's The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), two remarkably similar memoirs that define the individual in conflict with reactionary forces in modern American history. Chapter Five considers the nexus of gender, region, nation, and race in Zora Neale Hurston's problematic autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; expanded with previously unpublished chapters in 1984). This chapter explores the tensions within a text that combines both liberal and conservative sentiments before showing how this synthesis becomes even more pronounced in Hurston's subsequent essays. By stressing the significance of a liberal tradition in Southern women's self-writing, this dissertation supplements and challenges prevalent attitudes about the Southern Renaissance and the predominant concerns of its women writers