Download or read book The Immoderate Past written by C. Hugh Holman and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Immoderate Past deals with the southern writer's preoccupation with history, concentrating on representative novelists from three major periods. Finding the origins of this preoccupation in the antebellum period, when most American novelists wrote in the mode of Sir Walter Scott, C. Hugh Holman examines the Revolutionary romances of William Gilmore Simms. With the coming of realism to American fiction after the Civil War, the southern writer turned to a combination of the realistic method with the novel of manners in order to describe the way of life in the South during the nineteenth century. The Civil War replaced the American Revolution as the crucial event in the novels of this second period and was seen as disrupting the quality and texture of antebellum southern life. To illustrate the southern novel in the realistic tradition, Holman discusses Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground, DuBose Heyward's Peter Ashley, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, Allen Tate's The Fathers, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, and Margaret Walker's Jubilee. Since the 1930s writers in the region have experimented with modernistic techniques distorting reality in order to make special statement about the nature and meaning of the southern experience. To illustrate this latest development in southern writing, Holman turns to William Faulkner's Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!; Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, Brother to Dragons, and Wilderness; and William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner. The Immoderate Past closes with a consideration of the extent to which southern novelists have persisted in using time as a major dimension in their fiction, whereas time has tended to be displaced by space in the standard American novel.

Download or read book Vietnam and the Southern Imagination written by Owen W. Gilman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1992 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 7 Prose Writing 1940 1990 written by Sacvan Bercovitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume VII of the Cambridge History of American Literature examines a broad range of American literature of the past half-century, revealing complex relations to changes in society. Christopher Bigsby discusses American dramatists from Tennessee Williams to August Wilson, showing how innovations in theatre anticipated a world of emerging countercultures and provided America with an alternative view of contemporary life. Morris Dickstein describes the condition of rebellion in fiction from 1940 to 1970, linking writers as diverse as James Baldwin and John Updike. John Burt examines writers of the American South, describing the tensions between modernization and continued entanglements with the past. Wendy Steiner examines the postmodern fictions since 1970, and shows how the questioning of artistic assumptions has broadened the canon of American literature. Finally, Cyrus Patell highlights the voices of Native American, Asian American, Chicano, gay and lesbian writers, often marginalized but here discussed within and against a broad set of national traditions.

Download or read book Southern Crossings written by Daniel Cross Turner and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Daniel Cross Turner has made a key contribution to the critical study and appreciation of the diverse field of contemporary Southern poetics. “Southern Crossings” crosses a gulf in contemporary poetry criticism while using the idea—or ideas, many and contrary—of “Southernness” to appraise poetries created from the profuse, tangled histories of the region. Turner’s close readings are dynamic, even lyrical. He offers a new understanding of rhythm’s central place in contemporary poetry while considering the work of fifteen poets. Through his focus on varied yet interwoven forms of cultural memory, Turner also shows that memory is not, in fact, passé. The way we remember has as much to say about our present as our past: memory is living, shifting, culturally formed and framed. This is a valuable and important book that entwines new visions of poetic forms with forms of regional remembrance and identity.”—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Native Guard: Poems Offering new perspectives on a diversity of recent and still-practicing southern poets, from Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey to Betty Adcock, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Natasha Trethewey, and others, this study brilliantly illustrates poetry’s value as a genre well suited to investigating historical conditions and the ways in which they are culturally assimilated and remembered. Daniel Cross Turner sets the stage for his wide-ranging explorations with an introductory discussion of the famous Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and their vision of a “constant southerness” that included an emphasis on community and kinship, remembrance of the Civil War and its glorified pathos of defeat, and a distinctively southern (white) voice. Combining poetic theory with memory studies, he then shows how later poets, with their own unique forms of cultural remembrance, have reimagined and critiqued the idealized view of the South offered by the Fugitives. This more recent work reflects not just trauma and nostalgia but makes equally trenchant uses of the past, including historiophoty (the recording of history through visual images) and countermemory (resistant strains of cultural memory that disrupt official historical accounts). As Turner demonstrates, the range of poetries produced within and about the American South from the 1950s to the present helps us to recalibrate theories of collective remembrance on regional, national, and even transnational levels. With its array of new insights on poets of considerable reputation—six of the writers discussed here have won at least one Pulitzer Prize for poetry—Southern Crossings makes a signal contribution to the study of not only modern poetics and literary theory but also of the U.S. South and its place in the larger world. Daniel Cross Turner is an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. His articles, which focus on regional definition in national and global contexts and on aesthetic forms’ potential to record historical transitions, appear in edited collections as well as journals including Genre, Mosaic, the Southern Literary Journal, the Southern Quarterly, and the Mississippi Quarterly.

Download or read book Models from the Past in Roman Culture written by Matthew B. Roller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical examples played a key role in ancient Roman culture, and Matthew B. Roller's book presents a coherent model for understanding the rhetorical, moral, and historiographical operations of Roman exemplarity. It examines the process of observing, evaluating, and commemorating noteworthy actors, or deeds, and then holding those performances up as norms by which to judge subsequent actors or as patterns for them to imitate. The model is fleshed out via detailed case studies of individual exemplary performers, the monuments that commemorate them, and the later contexts - the political arguments and social debates - in which these figures are invoked to support particular positions or agendas. Roller also considers the boundaries of, and ancient alternatives to, exemplary modes of argumentation, morality, and historical thinking. The book will engage anyone interested in how societies, from ancient Rome to today, invoke past performers and their deeds to address contemporary concerns and interests.

Download or read book A History of American Poetry written by Richard Gray and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-03-30 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of American Poetry presents a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their pre-Columbian origins to the present day. Offers a detailed and accessible account of the entire range of American poetry Situates the story of American poetry within crucial social and historical contexts, and places individual poets and poems in the relevant intertextual contexts Explores and interprets American poetry in terms of the international positioning and multicultural character of the United States Provides readers with a means to understand the individual works and personalities that helped to shape one of the most significant bodies of literature of the past few centuries

Download or read book A History of American Literature written by Linda Wagner-Martin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE 1950 TO THE PRESENT Featuring works from notable authors as varied as Salinger and the Beats to Vonnegut, Capote, Morrison, Rich, Walker, Eggers, and DeLillo, A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present offers a comprehensive analysis of the wide range of literary works produced in the United States over the last six decades and a fascinating survey of the dramatic changes during America’s transition from the innocence of the fifties to the harsh realities of the first decade of the new millennium. Author Linda Wagner-Martin - a highly acclaimed authority on all facets of modern American literature - covers major works of drama, poetry, fiction, non- fiction, memoirs, and popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. Viewing works produced during this fertile literary period from a wide-ranging perspective, Wagner-Martin considers literature in relation to such issues as the politics of civil rights, feminism, sexual preferences, and race- and gender-based marketing. She also places a special emphasis on works produced during the twenty-first century, and writings influenced by recent historic events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the global financial crisis. With its careful balance of scholarly precision and accessibility, A History of American Literature: 1950 to the Present provides readers of all levels with rich and revealing insights into the diversity of literary forms and influences that characterize postmodern America. “A monumental distillation of an enormous range of material, Wagner-Martin’s rich book should be required reading for anyone grappling with making sense of the prolific, broad-spectrum, and diverse writing in the US since 1950.” Thadious M. Davis, University of Pennsylvania “Linda Wagner-Martin’s history impressively and judiciously surveys all fields of American writing over the past sixty years, taking full account of significant cultural and historical contexts and the major critical commentaries that have helped shape our understanding of developments in the second half of the last century and the dozen years following the millennium. Balanced, informative, and always highly readable there is much here for general readers, students, and specialists alike.” Christopher MacGowan, the College of William and Mary

Download or read book Fields Watered with Blood written by Margaret Walker and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing an international gathering of scholars, Fields Watered with Blood constitutes the first critical assessment of the full scope of Margaret Walker’s literary career. As they discuss Walker’s work, including the landmark poetry collection For My People and the novel Jubilee, the contributors reveal the complex interplay of concerns and themes in Walker’s writing: folklore and prophecy, place and space, history and politics, gender and race. In addition, the contributors remark on how Walker’s emphases on spirituality and on dignity in her daily life make themselves felt in her writings and show how Walker’s accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, activist, mother, and family elder influenced what and how she wrote. A brief biography, an interview with literary critic Claudia Tate, a chronology of major events in Walker’s life, and a selected bibliography round out this collection, which will do much to further our understanding of the writer whom poet Nikki Giovanni once called “the most famous person nobody knows.”

Download or read book Domestic Novelists in the Old South Defenders of Southern Culture written by Elizabeth Moss and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Religion and the Life of the Nation written by Rowland A. Sherrill and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Judgment and Grace in Dixie written by Charles Reagan Wilson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion has permeated nearly every aspect of modern southern culture in the US, with results that range from portraits of Jesus on black velvet to the soul-stirring orations of Martin Luther King Jr. This work gives an appraisal of religion's influence on such expressions of regional life as literature, music and folk art.

Download or read book South to the Future written by Fred C. Hobson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until recently, the American South has often been treated in isolation by historians and literary critics. In these essays five scholars of southern history and literature evaluate elements of contemporary--and future--southern experience, including place, community, culture, class, gender, and racial roles. Fred Hobson observes in his introductory essay that the U.S. South must be seen in relation to a larger world--the Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as European countries with a similar grounding in hardship and defeat. Moreover, the South can no longer be viewed in black-and-white terms--especially if the subject is race. Joel Williamson's essay challenges fellow historians to broaden their purview by getting acquainted with Gone with the Wind, Elvis Presley, and other phenomena of southern culture(s). Linda Wagner-Martin discusses the innovative ways in which contemporary southern writers such as Charles Frazier take on traditional southern concerns and shows us how "place becomes space" for Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, and other southern-born writers whose works are often set outside the geographical South. Thadious Davis looks at the "youngsters" of southern poetry, fiction, and drama, revealing how their work reflects a racially and ethnically mixed, digitized, and otherwise reconfigured South. In the writings of Shay Youngblood, Randall Kenan, Donna Tartt, Mona Lisa Salloy, and others, one can see the collapsing of distinctions between the literary and the popular, and a greater comfort with social fluidity and mobility. The concluding essay by Edward Ayers, set in 2076, offers a witty glimpse of things-perhaps-to-come. Through a series of short dispatches from a sixteen-year-old narrator of Scottish-Ghanian-Honduran-Korean-Cherokee descent, Ayers transports us to the Consolidated South that counts Incarceration Incorporated among its largest employers. As these writings signal new depths and directions in southern historical and literary studies, they compose a witty and erudite album of snapshots, revealing a region on the verge of big changes.

Download or read book A Certain Slant of Light Regionalism and the Form of Southern and Midwestern Fiction written by and published by LSU Press. This book was released on with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book After Southern Modernism written by Matthew Guinn and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The literature of the contemporary South might best be understood for its discontinuity with the literary past. At odds with traditions of the Southern Renascence, southern literature of today sharply refutes the Nashville Agrarians and shares few of Faulkner's and Welty's concerns about place, community, and history. This sweeping study of the literary South's new direction focuses on nine well established writers who, by breaking away from the firmly ensconced myths, have emerged as an iconoclastic generation- -- Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Randall Kenan, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, and Barry Hannah. Resisting the modernist methods of the past, they have established their own postmodern ground beyond the shadow of their predecessors. This shift in authorial perspective is a significant indicator of the future of southern writing. Crews's seminal role as a ground-breaking "poor white" author, Mason's and Crews's portrayals of rural life, and Allison's and Brown's frank portrayals of the lower class pose a challenge to traditional depictions of the South. The dissenting voices of Gibbons and Kenan, who focus on gender, race, and sexuality, create fiction that is at once identifiably "southern" and also distinctly subversive. Gibbons's iconoclastic stance toward patriarchy, like the outsider's critique of community found in Kenan's work, proffers a portrait of the South unprecedented in the region's literature. Ford, McCarthy, and Hannah each approach the South's traditional notions of history and community with new irreverence and treat familiar southern topics in a distinctly postmodern manner. Whether through Ford's generic consumer landscape, the haunted netherworld of McCarthy's southern novels, or Hannah's riotous burlesque of the Civil War, these authors assail the philosophical and cultural foundations from which the Southern Renascence arose. Challenging the conventional conceptions of the southern canon, this is a provocative and innovative contribution to the region's literary study.

Download or read book The Idea of the American South 1920 1941 written by Michael O'Brien and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1979. The idea of the "South" has its roots in Romanticism and American culture of the nineteenth century. This study by Michael O'Brien analyzes how the idea of a unique Southern consciousness endured into the twentieth century and how it affected the lives of prominent white Southern intellectuals. Individual chapters treat Howard Odum, John Donald Wade, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Frank Owsley, and Donald Davidson. The chapters trace each man's growing need for the idea of the South—how each defined it and how far each was able to sustain the idea as an element of social analysis. The Idea of the American South moves the debate over Southern identity from speculative essays about the "central theme" of Southern history and, by implication, past the restricted perception that race relations are a sufficient key to understanding the history of Southern identity.

Download or read book The Nation s Region written by Leigh Anne Duck and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South served as a repository of the country's romantic notions: the region was represented as a close-knit, custom-bound place through which the nation could temper its ambivalence about the upheavals of progress. The Great Depression changed this. Amid economic anxiety and the international rise of fascism, writes Duck, "the trope of the backward South began to comprise an image of what the United States could become." As she moves from the Depression to the nascent years of the civil rights movement to the early cold war era, Duck explains how experimental writers in each of these periods challenged ideas of a monolithically archaic South through innovative representations of time. She situates their narratives amid broad concern regarding national modernization and governance, as manifest in cultural and political debates, sociological studies, and popular film. Although southern modernists' modes and methods varied along this trajectory, their purpose remained focused: to explore the mutually constitutive relationships between social forms considered "southern" and "national."

Download or read book Literary Theory written by Julie Rivkin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-01-23 with total page 1652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of this bestselling literary theory anthology has been thoroughly updated to include influential texts from innovative new areas, including disability studies, eco-criticism, and ethics. Covers all the major schools and methods that make up the dynamic field of literary theory, from Formalism to Postcolonialism Expanded to include work from Stuart Hall, Sara Ahmed, and Lauren Berlant. Pedagogically enhanced with detailed editorial introductions and a comprehensive glossary of terms