Download or read book Unwelcome Voices written by Paul C. Jones and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature of the antebellum South has often been described in literary histories as little more than glorified propaganda for the aristocratic, slave-owning class. While this might pertain to the region’s historical romances that feature a dashing, resolute hero committed to upholding the dearly held institutions of slave-holding society and that relegate women and African Americans to roles as meek supporters or loyal comic sideshows, this view does not describe all of the South’s literature from this period.In Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South, Paul C. Jones argues that there was a subversive group of voices that dared challenge cherished southern traditions and raised questions about the issues facing the South in the years leading up to the Civil War, including slavery, democracy, and women’s rights.Jones examines the work of five southern writers from that era: James Heath, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, John Pendleton Kennedy, and E.D.E.N. Southworth. Each author was subversive in different ways: Heath featured a progressive hero who ignored the aristocratic assumptions of the South; Douglass presented a rebellious slave hero and made the slave-owning class his villains; Poe used horror to highlight the South’s hidden anxieties; Kennedy challenged the romantic visions of the South by opposing them with realistic depictions of the region; and Southworth employed abolitionist rhetoric to undermine traditionalist discourse. Jones clearly shows that the fiction of these writers diverged sharply from the South’s dominant literary formula.Unwelcome Voices represents a major turning point in the study of the literature of the antebellum South. It recognizes those authors who produced the counterweight to the writing meant to prop up the region’s elite class and slaveholding way of life. Unwelcome Voices will be a welcome and needed addition to the libraries of anyone interested in Southern history or the literature of the antebellum period.

Download or read book Ledgers of History written by Sally Wolff and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his familyb2ss ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulknerb2ss fiction. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscob2ss great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leakb2ss life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home.

Download or read book Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South written by Dickson D. Bruce and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-08-21 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book draws from a variety of sources—literature, politics, folklore, social history—to attempt to set Southern beliefs about violence in a cultural context. According to Dickson D. Bruce, the control of violence was a central concern of antebellum Southerners. Using contemporary sources, Bruce describes Southerners’ attitudes as illustrated in their duels, hunting, and the rhetoric of their politicians. He views antebellum Southerners as pessimistic and deeply distrustful of social relationships and demonstrates how this world view impelled their reliance on formal controls to regularize human interaction. The attitudes toward violence of masters, slaves, and “plain-folk”—the three major social groups of the period—are differentiated, and letters and family papers are used to illustrate how Southern child-rearing practices contributed to attitudes toward violence in the region. The final chapter treats Edgar Allan Poe as a writer who epitomized the attitudes of many Southerners before the Civil War.

Download or read book Masterless Men written by Keri Leigh Merritt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the lives of the Antebellum South's underprivileged whites in nineteenth-century America.

Download or read book Witnessing Slavery written by Frances Smith Foster and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **** New edition of the Greenwood Press original of 1979 (which is cited in BCL3), with a new introduction, chapter, and a supplementary bibliography. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Download or read book Apocalyptic Sentimentalism written by Kevin Pelletier and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a range of important antislavery figures, including David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism illustrates how antislavery discourse worked to redefine violence and vengeance as the ultimate expression (rather than denial) of love and sympathy.

Download or read book America s England written by Christopher Hanlon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the maneuvers through which U.S. partisans encoded the turmoil of antebellum America in terms of English affiliation. Demonstrating that English genealogies, geographies, and economics encoded the sectional crisis for southern and northern Americans, it locates sectionalism in a broader Atlantic context of cultural imagination and literary production.

Download or read book Home Fronts written by Lora Romero and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book on domesticity in literature

Download or read book How Celtic Culture Invented Southern Literature written by Cantrell, James P. and published by Pelican Publishing. This book was released on with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Southern writers in a Celtic context. This debut book of literary criticism challenges the common perception that the culture of white Southerners springs from English, or Anglo-Norman, roots. Mr. Cantrell presents persuasive historical and literary evidence that it was the South's Celtic, or Scots-Irish, settlers who had the biggest influence on Southern culture, and that their vibrant spirit is still felt today. It discusses the work of William Gilmore Simms, Ellen Glasgow, the Agrarians, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O'Connor, Pat Conroy, and James Everett Kibler.

Download or read book A Southern Odyssey written by John Hope Franklin and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1979-08-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick Law Olmsted, the northerner who wrote comprehensively about his travels in the South, had no southern counterpart. But there were thousands of southerners -- planters, merchants, bankers, students, housewives, writers, and politicians -- who traveled extensively in the North and who recorded their impressions in letters to their families, in articles for the local press, and in the few books they wrote. In A Southern Odyssey the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin canvasses the entire field of southern travel and analyzes the travelers and their accounts of what they saw in the North. Many went out of sheer curiosity. Others went on business, to get an education, to make purchases for the store and home, to attend religious or political conventions, or to instruct northerners about the superior qualities of the southern way of life and warn them of the dangers of unbridled abolitionist attacks. The more they went, the more they doubted the wisdom of spending money among their enemies. But they continued to go, even against their own advice to fellow southerners, and some tarried until the attack on Fort Sumter. Concentrating as it does on the human side of North-South relations during the antebellum years, A Southern Odyssey represents a fresh and imaginative approach to a long overlooked chapter in southern history. It is also a handsome book, with twenty illustrations that comprise "An Album of Southern Travel."

Download or read book The Mark of Slavery written by Jenifer L. Barclay and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the disability history of slavery Time and again, antebellum Americans justified slavery and white supremacy by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. Jenifer L. Barclay examines the ubiquitous narratives that depicted black people with disabilities as pitiable, monstrous, or comical, narratives used not only to defend slavery but argue against it. As she shows, this relationship between ableism and racism impacted racial identities during the antebellum period and played an overlooked role in shaping American history afterward. Barclay also illuminates the everyday lives of the ten percent of enslaved people who lived with disabilities. Devalued by slaveholders as unsound and therefore worthless, these individuals nonetheless carved out an unusual autonomy. Their roles as caregivers, healers, and keepers of memory made them esteemed within their own communities and celebrated figures in song and folklore. Prescient in its analysis and rich in detail, The Mark of Slavery is a powerful addition to the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and race.

Download or read book William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier written by John Caldwell Guilds and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Gilmore Simms (1807-1870), the antebellum South's foremost author and cultural critic, was the first advocate of regionalism in the creation of national literature. This collection of essays emphasizes his portrayal of America's westward migration.

Download or read book The Southern Hospitality Myth written by Anthony Szczesiul and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017-06-01 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hospitality as a cultural trait has been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but the origins of this association and the reasons for its perseverance often seem unclear. Anthony Szczesiul looks at how and why we have taken something so particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among diverse individuals and is widely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to make it a cultural trait of an entire region of the country. Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters, while cultural historians have treated it peripherally as a symptomatic expression of the southern code of honor. Although historians have offered different theories, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outstripped its actual practices. Szczesiul examines why we have chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South, and he raises fundamental ethical questions that underlie both the concept of hospitality and the cultural work of American memory, particularly in light of the region’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation.

Download or read book Keep the Days written by Steven M. Stowe and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary—wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day—was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance—and the limits—of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.

Download or read book The Human Tradition in Antebellum America written by Michael A. Morrison and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new book consists of mini-biographies of 15 Americans who lived during the Antebellum period in American history. Part of The Human Tradition in America series, the anthology paints vivid portraits of the lives of lesser-known Americans. Raising new questions from fresh perspectives, this volume contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamic forces that shaped the political, economic, social, and institutional changes that characterized the antebellum period. Moving beyond the older, outdated historical narratives of political institutions and the great men who shaped them, these biographies offer revealing insights on gender roles and relations, working-class experiences, race, and local economic change and its effect on society and politics. The voices of these ordinary individuals-African Americans, women, ethnic groups, and workers-have until recently often been silent in history texts. At the same time, these biographies also reveal the major themes that were part of the history of the early republic and antebellum era, including the politics of the Jacksonian era, the democratization of politics and society, party formation, market revolution, territorial expansion, the removal of Indians from their territory, religious freedom, and slavery. Accessible and fascinating, these biographies present a vivid picture of the richly varied character of American life in the first half of the nine-teenth century. This book is ideal for courses on the Early National period, U.S. history survey, and American social and cultural history.

Download or read book Fathers of Conscience written by Bernie D. Jones and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fathers of Conscience examines high-court decisions in the antebellum South that involved wills in which white male planters bequeathed property, freedom, or both to women of color and their mixed-race children. These men, whose wills were contested by their white relatives, had used trusts and estates law to give their slave partners and children official recognition and thus circumvent the law of slavery. The will contests that followed determined whether that elevated status would be approved or denied by courts of law. Bernie D. Jones argues that these will contests indicated a struggle within the elite over race, gender, and class issues--over questions of social mores and who was truly family. Judges thus acted as umpires after a man's death, deciding whether to permit his attempts to provide for his slave partner and family. Her analysis of these differing judicial opinions on inheritance rights for slave partners makes an important contribution to the literature on the law of slavery in the United States.

Download or read book The History of Southern Women s Literature written by Carolyn Perry and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002-03-01 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.