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Gathers short stories, journalism, and excerpts from novels, diaries, and memoirs by Southern authors.
The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.
"Race and Repast: Foodscapes in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature examines how race relations are expressed through struggles over the meaning of food and access to food in Southern literature. This innovative investigation offers new perspectives on the history of racial conflict in the South while illuminating how the very act of eating together allowed Southerners to cross race and class lines at a time of great strife"--
Augusta Jane Evans, a nineteenth-century writer from the American South, produced bestsellers in the genre of the domestic novel, popular between the 1820s and 1880s. Evans was particularly good in creating strong and independent heroines. She is best known for her blockbuster St. Elmo (1866), featuring the love story of Edna Earl and the passionate St. Elmo Murray. In Fire and Fiction: Augusta Jane Evans in Context Anne Sophie Riepma reconstructs the literary, cultural, religious, social, and historical contexts of Evans's work. She explores the author's relation to her times and focuses on the way her novels reflect and address the cultural experiences of Southern women. Riepma pays particular attention to topics such as the ideology of domesticity, domestic fiction, the concept of “woman's sphere,” women's role in society, middle-class culture, education and employment for women, religion, reform, political developments, and the Confederate War.
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-Ag...
Reconstruction politics and race relations between freed blacks and the white establishment in Perry County, Alabama In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry County, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion of Alabama, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregion...
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. T...
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, ...
"Goldfield looks at an array of issues from the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemmings controversy to debates over the Confederate flag to the proliferation of African American history museums and monuments in the region. Finally, he recalls his work as a consultant on U.S. Supreme Court cases involving a majority black voting district in North Carolina, as a coauthor of an environmental and economic impact study of offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and as a mitigating witness in the sentencing phases of six racially polarizing death penalty cases. His contributions, Goldfield hopes, made history more "real" to people in vocations outside of academia."--BOOK JACKET.
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