Bøger i Southern Literary Studies serien

An icon in African American history, Nat Turner has generated almost every kind of cultural product, including the historical, imaginative, scholarly, folk, polemical, and reflective. In Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, Mary Kemp Davis offers an original, in-depth analysis of six novels in which Turner figures prominently.

Dangerous Innocence investigates how prevailing constructions of white masculinity in the U.S. South help feed and reinforce systems of racial inequity. Tracing the rise of the "southern outsider" in literature and on television from 1960 to 2020, William P. Murray probes white Americans' enduring desire to assert their own blamelessness even though such acts of self-justification facilitate continued violence against historically oppressed populations. Dangerous Innocence courses from popular television such as The Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons through influential fiction by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other prominent southern authors--alongside forceful challenges voiced by Black writers including Chester Himes and Ernest Gaines--before turning to works created after the September 11 attacks that reinscribe cultural logics predicated on protecting white innocence and power. Concluding on a note of praxis, Dangerous Innocence argues that reattaching southern outsiders to a communal identity encourages an honest assessment about what whiteness represents and what it means to belong to a nation steeped in commitments to white supremacy.

Two Covenants serves to expand the definition of the American South by focusing on the contributions of Jews to the culture. While concerned with established concepts such as ethnicity and region, McGraw raises many questions that illustrate the complexity of southern Jewishness and also considers literary representations.

One of the most striking parts of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men is Chapter 4, in which narrator Jack Burden tells the story of his distant relative Cass Mastern. James Perkins fully explores how this episode supplies the crucial piece to a puzzle surrounding Warren's novel, tracing the story's evolution.

By critical consensus, Horton Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle - a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays. Drawing on a range of sources, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal oeuvre but also in the canon of American drama.

Hamilton Basso (1904-1964) was a novelist and literary critic with "The New Republic" and "The New Yorker". This is an integrated discussion of his life and work, using letters, diaries, manuscripts and interviews with family and friends.

The first full realization of the family saga in the southern tradition, Stephens says, was George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880). Stephens gives an extensive tour of twentieth-century authors who have used and further developed the southern family saga. He examines the works of writers such as T. S. Stribling and William Faulkner, who after the First World War reinterpreted the Civil War and its consequences in terms of a displaced inheritance; Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle, who built on the displacement motif to show family decline; Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Shirley Ann Grau, who in focusing on family stories transmitted by women explored implications of the matriarchal-patriarchal conflict resonating through generations; and Margaret Walker, Alex Haley, Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison, who showed the black family's struggle to find a place in history and later in memories of legendary Africa. Authors whom Stephens identifies as third-generation writers, such as Reynolds Price and Lee Smith, reach beyond history in their sagas to find moments of mythic vision, or they reduce family and public history to the pastless present of popular culture. The literary tradition of the family saga thrives in the South today, Stephens says, because there exists an operative context in which to read the saga: namely, some version of providential order, which affords glimpses of purpose beyond the daily struggles of generations. The Family Saga in the South will make an inestimable contribution to understanding this vital tradition in southern letters while pointing the way for study of the genre in other cultures.

In this insight-studded work that established him as the premier interpreter of southern literary culture, Fred Hobson explores the southern urge toward self-examination, the seeming compulsion of southern writers to discuss their region - some defending it, others damning it.

Draws on conversations, interviews, and friendship with Eudora Welty to discuss the intersections between biography and art in her work. Through an engaging chronological and comprehensive reading of the Welty canon, Suzanne Marrs describes the ways Welty's creative process transformed and transfigured fact to serve the purposes of fiction.

At a time when sectional conflicts were dividing the nation, the five best-selling southern domestic novelists vigorously came to the defense of their native region. In this volume, Elizabeth Moss locates these novelists within the broader context of antebellum social and political culture.

To read Hal Crowther is to find yourself agreeing with views on topics you never knew you cared so much about. In Gather at the River, Crowther cuts to the heart of political, religious, and cultural issues but pauses to appreciate the sweet things that the South has to offer, like music, baseball, great writers, and strong women.

Engages topics ranging from folklore to feminism to the Internet as it pays tribute to a distinctly American comic style that has continued to reinvent itself. This book gives splendid demonstration that through the centuries southern humour has continued to be a powerful tool for disarming hypocrites and opening up sensitive issues for discussion.

Locates the foundation of the South's dark humour in the upheavals of the nineteenth century. Examining the connection between comic victimization and real acts of aggression, Andrew Silver shows southern humour to be a product not of America's wholeness and national unity but of its internal fears, divisiveness, and perpetual civil strife.

Regionalism often evokes provinciality and an affiliation with minor literary genres, but Robert Jackson shows that region is an integral part of American identity, providing grounding for major independent voices.

With this study Karl Zender offers fresh readings of individual novels, themes, and motifs while also assessing the impact of recent politicised interpretations on our understanding of William Faulkner's achievement.

Continuing where Volume One of the Selected Letters left off, the missives from his Baton Rouge years show Warren exploring and testing the boundaries of his genius on a number of simultaneous fronts.

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.

From his first published book to his last works, Robert Penn Warren wrote novels, poetry, biographies, and essays based on the lives of American historical figures. In Making History, the first comprehensive survey of Warren's biographical narratives, Jonathan Cullick tracks a clear development toward autobiography in Warren's career.

Examines the paradox that communities famous for their cohesiveness and moral stability were in fact oppressive along race and class lines. The author uses readings from "Georgia Scenes", "Swallow Barn", "In Ole Virginia", "Lanterns on the Levee" and "Light in August" to illustrate this point.

On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner--were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Florence Mars, a native of Philadelphia, recounts the grim circumstances of the killings and describes what happened to a community confronted by a challenge to long-held beliefs.

Kate Chopin was a nationally acclaimed short story artist of the local colour school when she in 1899 shocked the American reading public with The Awakening. This volume provides an extensive re-examination of both the life and work of Kate Chopin, basing it on her total oeuvre.

In the South, one notion of "being ugly" implies inappropriate or coarse behaviour that transgresses social norms of courtesy. 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.

From the novels of Toni Morrison to the music of Beyonce Knowles, the cultural prevalence of a transnational black identity, as created by African American women, is more than a product of geographic mobility. Rather, as author Simone C. Drake shows, these constructions illuminate our understanding of a chronically marginalized demographic.

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.

Provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Peggy Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen women authors.

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. The book portrays Morrison as a historiographer bridging the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins.

An arresting comparative analysis, Prophets of Recognition invites readers to consider four well-known post-World War II American novels, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter.

In these interviews, and in the forty-three splendid black-and-white photographs that accompany them, we move through William Faulkner's home territory and encounter the sources of his sense of place and its past: antebellum Rowan Oak; old plantation homes and dogtrot houses; narrow one-lane bridges; country churches and cemeteries.

In this study, Ruth D. Weston probes the whole of Eudora Welty's work to reveal the writer's close relationship to the gothic tradition. Specifically, Weston shows how Welty employs the theme of enclosure and escape and settings that convey a sense of mystery, gothic adaptations both, to create certain narrative techniques in her fiction.

Confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s.