Download or read book Reading Reconstruction written by Kathryn B. McKee and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism written by Russel Whitaker and published by Nineteenth-Century Literature. This book was released on 2005-05 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Literature of Reconstruction written by Brook Thomas and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this groundbreaking new study, author Brook Thomas argues that literary analysis can enhance our historical understanding of race and Reconstruction. The standard view that Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877 is a retrospective construction. Works of literature provide the perspective of those who continued to see possibilities for its renewal well past 1877. Historians have long tried to reconcile social history's emphasis on the local with political history's emphasis on the national. Literature creates national political allegories while focusing on events in a particular locale. Moreover, the debate over Reconstruction was a debate about state legitimacy as well as specific laws. It was a question of foundational myths as well as foundational legal principles. Literature's political allegories allow us to recreate those debates rather than view the end of Reconstruction as a foregone conclusion. Because many of the issues raised by Reconstruction remain unresolved, those debates continue into the present. Chapters treat how the racial issues raised by Reconstruction are interwoven with debates over state v. national authority, efforts to combat terrorism (the KKK), the paternalism of welfare, economic expansion, and the question of who should rightly inherit the nation's past. Thomas examines authors who opposed Reconstruction, authors who supported it, and authors who struggled with mixed feelings. This exciting text will set the standard in literary historical studies for decades to come"--

Download or read book Stories with a Moral written by Michael E. Price and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories with a Moral is the first comprehensive study of the effects of plantation society on literature and the influences of literature on social practices in nineteenth-century Georgia. During the years of frontier settlement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, Georgia authors voiced their support for the slave system, the planter class, and the ideals of the Confederacy, presenting a humorous, passionate, and at times tragic view of a rapidly changing world. Michael E. Price examines works of fiction, travel accounts, diaries, and personal letters in this thorough survey of King Cotton's literary influence, showing how Georgia authors romanticized agrarian themes to present an appealing image of plantation economy and social structure. Stories with a Moral focuses on the importance of literature as a mode of ideological communication. Even more significant, the book shows how the writing of one century shaped the development of social practices and beliefs that persist, in legend and memory, to this day.

Download or read book Southern Queen written by Thomas Ruys Smith and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-08-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible and entertaining look at this crucible period in the life of one of America's most distinctive cities.

Download or read book The Promise of the New South written by Edward L. Ayers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-07 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.

Download or read book Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Black Reconstruction in America 1860 1880 written by W. E. B. Du Bois and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1998 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pioneering work in the study of the role of Black Americans during Reconstruction by the most influential Black intellectual of his time. This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 has justly been called a classic.

Download or read book Belles and Poets written by Julia Nitz and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2020-11-04 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Belles and Poets, Julia Nitz analyzes the Civil War diary writing of eight white women from the U.S. South, focusing specifically on how they made sense of the world around them through references to literary texts. Nitz finds that many diarists incorporated allusions to poems, plays, and novels, especially works by Shakespeare and the British Romantic poets, in moments of uncertainty and crisis. While previous studies have overlooked or neglected such literary allusions in personal writings, regarding them as mere embellishments or signs of elite social status, Nitz reveals that these references functioned as codes through which women diarists contemplated their roles in society and addressed topics related to slavery, Confederate politics, gender, and personal identity. Nitz’s innovative study of identity construction and literary intertextuality focuses on diaries written by the following women: Eliza Frances (Fanny) Andrews of Georgia (1840–1931), Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut of South Carolina (1823–1886), Malvina Sara Black Gist of South Carolina (1842–1930), Sarah Ida Fowler Morgan of Louisiana (1842–1909), Cornelia Peake McDonald of Virginia (1822–1909), Judith White Brockenbrough McGuire of Virginia (1813–1897), Sarah Katherine (Kate) Stone of Louisiana (1841–1907), and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas of Georgia (1843–1907). These women’s diaries circulated in postwar commemoration associations, and several saw publication. The public acclaim they received helped shape the collective memory of the war and, according to Nitz, further legitimized notions of racial supremacy and segregation. Comparing and contrasting their own lives to literary precedents and fictional role models allowed the diarists to process the privations of war, the loss of family members, and the looming defeat of the Confederacy. Belles and Poets establishes the extent to which literature offered a means of exploring ideas and convictions about class, gender, and racial hierarchies in the Civil War–era South. Nitz’s work shows that literary allusions in wartime diaries expose the ways in which some white southern women coped with the war and its potential threats to their way of life.

Download or read book The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood 1865 1895 written by Jane Turner Censer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This impressively researched book tells the important but little-known story of elite southern white women's successful quest for a measure of self-reliance and independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow. Profusely illustrated with the experiences of fascinating women in Virginia and North Carolina, it presents a compelling new chapter in the history of American women and of the South. As were many ideas, notions of the ideal woman were in flux after the Civil War. While poverty added a harder edge to the search for a good marriage among some "southern belles," other privileged white women forged identities that challenged the belle model altogether. Their private and public writings from the 1870s and 1880s suggest a widespread ethic of autonomy. Sometimes that meant increased domestic skills born of the new reality of fewer servants. But women also owned and transmitted property, worked for pay, and even pursued long-term careers. Many found a voice in a plethora of new voluntary organizations, and some southern women attained national celebrity in the literary world, creating strong and capable heroines and mirroring an evolving view toward northern society. Yet even as elite southern women experimented with their roles, external forces and contradictions within their position were making their unprecedented attitudes and achievements socially untenable. During the 1890s, however, virulent racism and pressures to re-create a mythic South left these women caught between the revived image of the southern belle and the emerging emancipated woman. Just as the memoirs of southern white women have been key to understanding life during the Civil War, the writings of such women unlock the years of dramatic change that followed. Informed by myriad primary documents, Jane Turner Censer immerses us in the world of postwar southern women as they rethought and rebuilt themselves, their families, and their region during a brief but important period of relative freedom.

Download or read book Iron Confederacies written by Scott Reynolds Nelson and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During Reconstruction, an alliance of southern planters and northern capitalists rebuilt the southern railway system using remnants of the Confederate railroads that had been built and destroyed during the Civil War. In the process of linking Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia by rail, this alliance created one of the largest corporations in the world, engendered bitter political struggles, and transformed the South in lasting ways, says Scott Nelson. Iron Confederacies uses the history of southern railways to explore linkages among the themes of states' rights, racial violence, labor strife, and big business in the nineteenth-century South. By 1868, Ku Klux Klan leaders had begun mobilizing white resentment against rapid economic change by asserting that railroad consolidation led to political corruption and black economic success. As Nelson notes, some of the Klan's most violent activity was concentrated along the Richmond-Atlanta rail corridor. But conflicts over railroads were eventually resolved, he argues, in agreements between northern railroad barons and Klan leaders that allowed white terrorism against black voters while surrendering states' control over the southern economy.

Download or read book Burying the Dead but Not the Past written by Caroline E. Janney and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South written by Sharon Monteith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion maps the dynamic literary landscape of the American South. From pre- and post-Civil War literature to modernist and civil rights fictions and writing by immigrants in the 'global' South of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these newly commissioned essays from leading scholars explore the region's established and emergent literary traditions. Touching on poetry and song, drama and screenwriting, key figures such as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, and iconic texts such as Gone with the Wind, chapters investigate how issues of class, poverty, sexuality and regional identity have textured Southern writing across generations. The volume's rich contextual approach highlights patterns and connections between writers while offering insight into the development of Southern literary criticism, making this Companion a valuable guide for students and teachers of American literature, American studies and the history of storytelling in America.

Download or read book The Companion to Southern Literature written by Joseph M. Flora and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001-11-01 with total page 1096 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Nineteenth Century Southern Literature written by J. V. Ridgely and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Nineteenth century Literature Criticism written by Laurie Lanzen Harris and published by Nineteenth-Century Literature. This book was released on 1984-02 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers and other creative writers who lived between 1800 and 1900, from the first published critical appraisals to current evaluations.

Download or read book Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism written by Paula Kepos and published by Nineteenth-Century Literature. This book was released on 1991-09-27 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.