Download or read book Southern Writers at Century s End written by Jeffrey J. Folks and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this century. As the region's contemporary writers have begun to gain a wide audience, critics have begun to distinguish what Hugh Holman has called "the fresh, the vital, and the new" in southern literary culture. Southern Writers at Century's End is the first volume to take an extensive look at the current generation of southern writers. Authors considered include: James Lee Burke, Fred Chappell, Robert Drake, Andre Dubus, Clyde Edgerton, Richard Ford, Kaye Gibbons, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, Mary Hood, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Richard Marius, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Tim McLaurin, T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith, Anne Tyle,r Alice Walker, and James Wilcox.
Download or read book The Female Tradition in Southern Literature written by Carol S. Manning and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Twenty First Century Southern Writers written by Jean W. Cash and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributions by Destiny O. Birdsong, Jean W. Cash, Kevin Catalano, Amanda Dean Freeman, David Gates, Richard Gaughran, Rebecca Godwin, Joan Wylie Hall, Dixon Hearne, Phillip Howerton, Emily D. Langhorne, Shawn E. Miller, Melody Pritchard, Nick Ripatrazone, Bes Stark Spangler, Scott Hamilton Suter, Melanie Benson Taylor, Jay Varner, and Scott D. Yarbrough Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers: New Voices, New Perspectives, an anthology of critical essays, introduces a new group of fiction writers from the American South. These fresh voices, like their twentieth-century predecessors, examine what it means to be a southerner in the modern world. These writers’ works cover wide-ranging subjects and themes: the history of the region, the continued problems of the working-class South, the racial divisions that have continued, the violence of the modern world, and the difficulties of establishing a spiritual identity in a modern context. The approaches and styles vary from writer to writer, with realistic, place-centered description as the foundation of many of their works. They have also created new perspectives regarding point of view, and some have moved toward the inclusion of “magic realism” and even science fiction in their work. The nineteen essays in Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers feature a handful of fiction writers who are already well known, such as National Book Award–winner Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Michael Farris Smith, and Inman Majors. Others deserve greater recognition, and, in many cases, works in this anthology will be the first pieces of analysis dedicated to writers and their work. Twenty-First-Century Southern Writers aims to alert scholars of southern literature, as well as the reading public, to an exciting and varied group of writers, while laying a foundation for future examination of these works.
Download or read book The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction written by Martyn Bone and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2014-01-13 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The South in American Literature 1607 1900 written by Jay B. Hubbell and published by . This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 1006 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The World Is Our Home written by Jeffrey J. Folks and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1970s southern fiction has been increasingly attentive to social issues, including the continuing struggles for racial justice and gender equality, the loss of a sense of social community, and the decline of a coherent regional identity. The essays in The World Is Our Home focus on writers who have explicitly addressed social and cultural issues in their fiction and drama, including Dorothy Allison, Horton Foote, Ernest J. Gaines, Jill McCorkle, Walker Percy, Lee Smith, William Styron, Alice Walker, and many others. The contributors provide valuable insights into the transformation of southern culture over the past thirty years and probe the social and cultural divisions that persist. The collection makes an important case for the centrality of social critique in contemporary southern fiction.
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 2014-07-15 with total page 144 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 The Belle Gone Bad written by Betina Entzminger and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Scarlett O’Hara fluttered her dark lashes, did she threaten only the gentleman in her parlor or the very culture that produced her? Examining the “bad belle” as a recurring character, The Belle Gone Bad finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within. Combining the southern ideal of ladyhood with the sexual power of the dark seductress, the bad belle is the perfect figure with which to critique a culture that effectively enslaved both its white and black women. Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing; the men subject to her cultivated charms often meet disastrous ends. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name. Representations of the bad belle evolved along with southern society, and by the late twentieth century, many women writers expressed emancipation through the literal or figurative destruction of corrupt or would-be belles. The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did—through the strategy of the bad belle character—challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What unites the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential.
Download or read book South to A New Place written by Suzanne W. Jones and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cry of An Occasion written by Richard Bausch and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To drink deep of the direction and sensibility of contemporary southern fiction, savor each dram in this delectable volume. Nineteen of the South’s most venerable writers—Madison Smartt Bell, Doris Betts, Fred Chappell, Ellen Douglas, Shelby Foote, George Garrett, Allan Gurganus, Barry Hannah, William Hoffman, Madison Jones, Michael Knight, William Henry Lewis, Jill McCorkle, Lewis Nordan, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Lee Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, Walter Sullivan, and Allen Wier—have selected a short work for inclusion here. All of the contributors are affiliated with the Fellowship of Southern Writers, organized in 1989 under the inspiration of the late Cleanth Brooks for the purpose of encouraging and honoring excellence in southern letters. Each piece in The Cry of an Occasion celebrates the distinctness of southern experience, giving expression in story form to a singular episode of mind, heart, or will. Varying from whimsical to ominous to sidesplitting to melancholy, the stories share a regard for the people who brush against us and in so doing shape us—generations of family especially, neighbors, as well as those occasional individuals who can mysteriously yet profoundly affect our lives. On a freezing December night, a woman returning home from a first date with a man finds herself locked out of her apartment; the pains he takes to help her surprise them both. A teenage girl suffers the day of her grandmother’s funeral attempting to be adult, furious with the pessimism of her mother and wounded by the absence of her father since she was three. A slave fleeing Mississippi in 1862 draws on the wisdom of breaking horses passed down from his grandfather to win assistance in his flight for freedom. Fourteen years after his teenage son’s death, a man realizes his mourning is incomplete despite therapy, relocation, and the outward signs of contentment. A pregnant woman has vivid dreams—of giving birth to a kitten, of -forgetting her baby on the hood of her car, and of concealing a joint in her bra—as she watches Boston’s changing seasons and struggles with her torturous enjoyment of smoking. “Now where will it all end?” asks one character. “All this pain and loving, mystery and loss. And it just goes on and on.” The occasion and expression of southern fiction are in hale and hardy form, and reading this exemplary collection is pure pleasure.
Download or read book The Intellectual in Twentieth Century Southern Literature written by Tara Powell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-01-09 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Never in its long history has the South provided an entirely comfortable home for the intellectual. In this thought-provoking contribution to the field of southern studies, Tara Powell considers the evolving ways that major post--World War II southern writers have portrayed intellectuals -- from Flannery O'Connor's ironic view of "interleckchuls" to Gail Godwin's southerners striving to feel at home in the academic world. Although Walker Percy, like his fellow Catholic writer O'Connor, explicitly rejected the intellectual label for himself, he nonetheless introduced the modern novel of ideas to southern letters, Powell shows, by placing sympathetic, non-caricatured intellectuals at the center of his influential works. North Carolinians Doris Betts and her student Tim McLaurin made their living teaching literature and creative writing in academia, and Betts's fiction often includes dislocated academics while McLaurin's superb memoirs, often funny, frequently point up the limitations of the mind as opposed to the heart and the spirit. Examining works by Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Randall Kenan, Powell traces the evolution of the black American literacy narrative from a stress on the post-Emancipation conviction, which saw formal education as an essential means of resisting oppression, to the growing suspicion in the post--civil rights era of literacy acts that may estrange educated blacks from the larger black community. Powell concludes with Godwin, who embraces university life in her fiction as she explores what it means to be a southern female intellectual in the modern world -- a world in which all those markers inscribe isolation.
Download or read book Self Labor written by Monica F. Jacobe and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The search for identity has long been a central theme of Southern novels, and critics of American literature often group the interplay among the individual, the region's history, and the physical landscape as key elements when writing about the South and its literary landscape. This dissertation examines the ways that authors working in the second half of the twentieth century seek meaning for their characters' journeys in light of both the historical and literary legacies left to them by American history and Southern writers. Specifically, four writers publishing extensively in the second half of the twentieth century are brought together by a common and uniting factor: for each, the personal agency created by individual work and work life is the catalyst for transformation in the journeys of their protagonists and remains so across their literary careers to date. Walker Percy, Ernest Gaines, Gail Godwin, and Alice Walker are markedly different Southern writers with careers that span the final decades of the twentieth century and established places in scholarly and popular conversations about Southern literature. By using them to ask why this one element of narrative identity---among so many that rise inherently from the region---plays this key role, this study reaffirms the work of earlier criticism but goes beyond it, revealing that, just as Faulkner and others felt the need to explain the South's past, contemporary writers feel the urge to explain how and why they are moving beyond that past---both physical and literary---to a place where the region is defined by the people who live and work in it, not the other way around. This commonality evidenced in the novels of all four writers featured here is used to argue that contemporary Southern fiction is, collectively, reversing the Faulknerian tropes that defined region, privileging history and family legacy above the individual, and becoming a body of literature about the individual existing within the region and defining the self at first conflicted about, then in resistance to, and, finally, in absence of the definition of the American South created by the region's history and literature."southern novel."
Download or read book Imagining Our Time written by Lewis P. Simpson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lewis P. Simpson towers among scholars of American literary studies, as an intellectual historian of the South and American literary culture and a revered essayist. His last book, Imagining Our Time, offers a wide-ranging, erudite, and enlightening look at the culture of letters in American society. Primarily through an examination of the works of some of the leading writers of the twentieth century, many of whom Simpson knew intimately, this final volume provides insight into the struggles and concerns unique to prominent American thinkers, literary artists, and critics contemporary to his own lifetime. Often moving from an intriguing anecdote or recollection to a rigorous discussion of ideas, Simpson’s style is captivating. He begins with speculation on Eric Voegelin’s interest in Julien Benda’s polemic La Trahison des Clercs and follows with thoughts on the declining faith in the university as an embodiment of humanistic letters and learning, surveying the American Republic as far back as Benjamin Franklin. In successive chapters, Simpson pays tribute to Malcolm Cowley as a "hero of the literary art" and probes Robert Penn Warren’s fixation with Thomas Jefferson as manifested in the writing and complete rewriting of Brother to Dragons. He ruminates on the vocation of the critic as practiced by Lionel Trilling and Diana Trilling, and the literary and cultural politics of the 1930s. Brief portraits of Andrew Lytle and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., appear, as well as a poignant argument for the autobiographical cast of Eudora Welty’s writing. A lengthy, riveting consideration of Simpson’s friend Walker Percy and Percy’s quest for identity as a modern Christian novelist alienated from the society around him forms the core of the volume. Fred Hobson’s introduction fittingly rounds out Imagining Our Time, offering an intimate appreciation of Lewis Simpson-who will remain a giant among scholars of southern literary studies.
Download or read book Spying on the South written by Tony Horwitz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-12 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz. With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extraordinary journey, as an undercover correspondent in the South for the up-and-coming New York Times. For the Connecticut Yankee, pen name "Yeoman," the South was alien, often hostile territory. Yet Olmsted traveled for 14 months, by horseback, steamboat, and stagecoach, seeking dialogue and common ground. His vivid dispatches about the lives and beliefs of Southerners were revelatory for readers of his day, and Yeoman's remarkable trek also reshaped the American landscape, as Olmsted sought to reform his own society by creating democratic spaces for the uplift of all. The result: Central Park and Olmsted's career as America's first and foremost landscape architect. Tony Horwitz rediscovers Yeoman Olmsted amidst the discord and polarization of our own time. Is America still one country? In search of answers, and his own adventures, Horwitz follows Olmsted's tracks and often his mode of transport (including muleback): through Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across Texas to the contested Mexican borderland. Venturing far off beaten paths, Horwitz uncovers bracing vestiges and strange new mutations of the Cotton Kingdom. Horwitz's intrepid and often hilarious journey through an outsized American landscape is a masterpiece in the tradition of Great Plains, Bad Land, and the author's own classic, Confederates in the Attic.
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 The Wife Upstairs written by Rachel Hawkins and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instant New York Times and USA Today Bestseller "Compulsively readable...a gothic thriller laced with arsenic." ––EW One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2021: CNN • Newsweek • Vulture • PopSugar • Parade • BuzzFeed • E!Online • TimeOut • Woman's Day • Goodreads • She Reads • Good Housekeeping • CrimeReads • Frolic • Hello! • Mystery and Suspense January 2021 Indie Next Pick and #1 LibraryReads Pick A delicious twist on a Gothic classic, The Wife Upstairs pairs Southern charm with atmospheric domestic suspense, perfect for fans of B.A. Paris and Megan Miranda. Meet Jane. Newly arrived to Birmingham, Alabama, Jane is a broke dog-walker in Thornfield Estates––a gated community full of McMansions, shiny SUVs, and bored housewives. The kind of place where no one will notice if Jane lifts the discarded tchotchkes and jewelry off the side tables of her well-heeled clients. Where no one will think to ask if Jane is her real name. But her luck changes when she meets Eddie Rochester. Recently widowed, Eddie is Thornfield Estates’ most mysterious resident. His wife, Bea, drowned in a boating accident with her best friend, their bodies lost to the deep. Jane can’t help but see an opportunity in Eddie––not only is he rich, brooding, and handsome, he could also offer her the kind of protection she’s always yearned for. Yet as Jane and Eddie fall for each other, Jane is increasingly haunted by the legend of Bea, an ambitious beauty with a rags-to-riches origin story, who launched a wildly successful southern lifestyle brand. How can she, plain Jane, ever measure up? And can she win Eddie’s heart before her past––or his––catches up to her? With delicious suspense, incisive wit, and a fresh, feminist sensibility, The Wife Upstairs flips the script on a timeless tale of forbidden romance, ill-advised attraction, and a wife who just won’t stay buried. In this vivid reimagining of one of literature’s most twisted love triangles, which Mrs. Rochester will get her happy ending?
Download or read book Southern Writers written by William Peterfield Trent and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. 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. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. 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.
