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 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.
Download or read book Southern Women Writers written by Tonette Bond Inge and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Southern Mothers written by Nagueyalti Warren and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dirt and Desire written by Patricia Yaeger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Being Ugly written by Monica Carol Miller and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the South, one notion of “being ugly” implies inappropriate or coarse behavior that transgresses social norms of courtesy. While popular stereotypes of the region often highlight southern belles as the epitome of feminine power, women writers from the South frequently stray from this convention and invest their fiction with female protagonists described as ugly or chastised for behaving that way. Through this divergence, “ugly” can be a force for challenging the strictures of normative southern gender roles and marriage economies. In Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion, Monica Carol Miller reveals how authors from Margaret Mitchell to Monique Truong employ “ugly” characters to upend the expectations of patriarchy and open up more possibilities for southern female identity. Previous scholarship often conflates ugliness with such categories as the grotesque, plain, or abject, but Miller disassociates these negative descriptors from a group of characters created by southern women writers. Focusing on how such characters appear prone to rebellious and socially inappropriate behavior, Miller argues that ugliness subverts assumptions about gender by identifying those who are unsuitable for the expected roles of marriage and motherhood. As opposed to familiar courtship and marriage plots, Miller locates in fiction by southern women writers an alternative genealogy, the ugly plot. This narrative tradition highlights female characters whose rebellion offers a space for re-imagining alternative lives and households in opposition to the status quo. Reading works by canonical writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, along with recent texts by contemporary authors like Helen Ellis, Lee Smith, and Jesmyn Ward, Being Ugly offers an important new perspective on how southern women writers confront regressive ideologies that insist upon limited roles for women.
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 A Southern Weave of Women written by Linda Tate and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Making a Stand written by Emily Watkins Allen and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Southern Women s Writing written by Mary Weaks-Baxter and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the lives of major southern women authors and presents an example of the work of each.
Download or read book Southern Women s Fiction 1980 1990 written by Linda Kay Tate and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Women of Letters the Southern Renaissance and a Literature of Self definition written by William Oliver Brantley and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Inventing Southern Literature written by Michael Kreyling and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2012 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I take...an outward route, arguing that the Agrarian project was and must be seen as a willed campaign on the part of one elite to establish and control 'the South' in a period of intense cultural maneuvering. The principal organizers of I'll Take My Stand knew full well there were other 'Souths' than the one they touted; they deliberately presented a fabricated South as the one and only real thing. In Inventing Southern Literature Michael Kreyling casts a penetrating ray upon the traditional canon of southern literature and questions the modes by which it was created. He finds that it was, indeed, an invention rather than a creation. In the 1930s the foundations were laid by the Fugitive-Agrarian group, a band of poet-critics that wished not only to design but also to control the southern cultural entity in a conservative political context. From their heyday to the present, Kreyling investigates the historical conditions under which literary and cultural critics have invented the South and how they have chosen its representations. Through his study of these choices, Kreyling argues that interested groups have shaped meanings that preserve a South as the South. As the Fugitive-Agrarians molded the region according to their definition in I'll Take My Stand, they professed to have developed a critical method that disavowed any cultural or political intent or content, a claim that Kreyling disproves. He shows that their torch was taken by Richard Weaver on the Right and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., on the Center-Left and that both critics tried to preserve the Fugitive-Agrarian credo despite the severe stresses imposed during the era of desegregation. As the southern literary paradigm has been attacked and defended, certain issues have remained in the forefront. Kreyling takes on three: reconciling the imperatives of race with the traditional definitions of the South; testing the ways white women writers of the South have negotiated space within or outside the paradigm; and analyzing the critics' use and abuse of William Faulkner (the major figure of southern literature) as they have relied on his achievement to anchor the total project called Southern Literature. Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of several books, including "Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order" and "Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell."
Download or read book Elizabeth Spencer s Complicated Cartographies written by C. Seltzer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book subjects the works of Elizabeth Spencer, critically acclaimed but canonically marginalized, to a study that reveals their interaction with the southern canon as they question its boundaries and remap the long-established landscapes of southern identity.
Download or read book Stirring the Pot written by Laura Sloan Patterson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "domesticity" may bring to mind cooking, cleaning, and tranquil evenings at home. During the last few decades, however, American domesticity has become ever more politicized as third-wave feminists, conservative critics, and others debate the very meaning of home and family. Despite this new wave of debate, the home, particularly the kitchen, is comfortable territory for the consolidation of issues of gender, space, marketplace, community, and technology in twentieth century literature. This work looks closely at a wide variety of southern domestic literature, focusing particularly on the role of the family kitchen as a driving force in the narratives of Ellen Glasgow, Eudora Welty, Lee Smith, and Toni Morrison. Topics include the overtones of isolation and the almost claustrophobic third-person narration of Glasgow's Virginia and Life and Gabriella; the communal kitchen and its role in defining the sexual discourse of Welty's Delta Wedding; the unification of national railway lines and its consequences for the traditional Appalachian kitchen in Smith's Oral History and Fair and Tender Ladies; and the lasting effects of slavery on the "haunted domesticity" of the African-American kitchen in Morrison's Jazz, Paradise, and Love.
Download or read book Thy Truth Then Be Thy Dowry written by Stéphanie Durrans and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays provides new insights into the theme of inheritance in American women’s writing, ranging from Emily Dickinson’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s legacy to Meredith Sue Willis’s exploration of the tension between material inheritance and spiritual heritage in the Appalachian context. Using diverse critical and theoretical models, the twelve contributors examine women’s problematic relationship to inheritance in a variety of historical, geographical, and personal contexts, bringing to the fore a number of strategies of resistance and empowerment that have helped women cope with the burden or the lack of any inheritance through the centuries. Grouped into four sections, these essays successively investigate women’s attempts to grapple with the curse of personal or national inheritance, the troubled relationship with the father figure, the classic trope of the haunted, Gothic house, and the plight of more contemporary women writers who have been relegated to the dead zone of American literary inheritance. Of crucial importance for all of these writers is the tension between the home and the land, as well as a questioning of intertextuality as the starting-point for a reconfiguration of the self in its relationship with the past.
Download or read book Friendship and Sympathy Communities of Southern Women Writers written by Rosemary M. Magee and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
