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In Refusing to Be Made Whole: Disability in Black Women’s Writing, author Anna LaQuawn Hinton examines how contemporary Black women writers present becoming disabled as a traumatic and violent experience of Black womanhood. Nevertheless, Black women embrace disabled Black womanhood by turning to Africanist spiritual understandings of wholeness, which view debilitating injury and illness as not only physical but also spiritual, not just an individual problem but a symptom of discord in the community. Black women use these belief systems to reimagine healing in ways that make space for a variety of bodymindspirits. Hinton maintains that this is not only a major theme in contemporary Black wo...
"Experimentation and Versatility considers Chappell's first four novels and his short fiction - the novels chronologically and the short stories thematically - in order to demonstrate the unique range and importance of his fictional prose. Rather than inserting Chappell's fictional variables into a single theoretical formula, Clabough traces and celebrates their various and multifaceted excursions into genres as disparate as Appalachian pastoralism and experimental science fiction. Containing both an interview with Chappell and a previously unpublished short story, Experimentation and Versatility also offers new primary sources on Chappell's work, even as it contextualizes him as one of our ...
Elements: The Novels of James Dickey draws upon previously undiscussed manuscripts and notes to articulate Dickey's fictional vision as it appears in his three published novels, while also examining his early unpublished fiction and post deliverance screenplays. The book's thesis follows Dickey's philosophical and verbal theorgy for his published fiction (the practice of merging), illustrating the multifaceted and layered manner in which it functions, encompassing protagonist and environment and reader and text. Just as Ed Gentry, Joel Cahill, and Muldrow assume the essence of their respective environments, the reader is subtly asked to become a part of the text while retaining cognitive independence "to blend in the place your're in, but with a mind to do something" (To the White Sea 273). Having explored the connective qualities of Dickey's published novels, the book's final chapter turns to a summary of Dickey's unpublished and largely unknown fiction. Discussing a novel manuscript, four short stories, three screenplays, and five screenplay prospecti, the chapter seeks to summarize these heretofore undiscussed works while also tracing their similarities with the published texts.
"I know of no other book exactly like this one, yet it is part of a tradition. One thinks of the best work of John McPhee, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard. The writing is at once eloquent, elegant, and evocative. In short, it is a beautifully written work: a genuine pleasure to read, and to re-read." -George Garrett "Casey Clabough's unique vision, his curious and important quest, his personable and earnest manner of expression draw us into his world just that engagingly. His world is our world, too, the trace our ancestors followed into the wilderness to transform a landscape into a nation. History, memoir, travel journal, meditation--The Warrior's Path is all these things at once, its firm un...
Gayl Jones is dedicated to the art of "verbal authenticity," stemming from her identification with her African American heritage. Amid widespread critical praise as well as pointed attacks for her controversial first two novels, Jones has shown a constantly evolving cultural consciousness. This first single-author study of Gayl Jones recovers the work of an under-examined yet immensely skillful contemporary writer. It offers a thorough examination of her technical innovations as well as her willingness to explore controversial subject matter. The book addresses such crucial themes as Afrocentrism, diasporas, mythopoesis, post-colonialism and globalization, and offers close readings of the aesthetic and political interchanges within Jones's fiction, drama, poetry, and criticism. Two interviews with Gayl Jones are included.
A regional studies review.
The idea of place--any place--remains one of our most basic yet slippery concepts. It is a space with boundaries whose limits may be definite or indefinite; it can be a real location or an abstract mental, spiritual, or imaginary construction. Casey Clabough’s thorough examination of the importance of place in southern literature examines the works of a wide range of authors, including Fred Chappell, George Garrett, William Hoffman, Julien Green, Kelly Cherry, David Huddle, and James Dickey. Clabough expands the definition of "here" beyond mere geography, offering nuanced readings that examine tradition and nostalgia and explore the existential nature of "place." Deeply concerned with lite...
This text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.
“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 ...
Appalachia resides in the American imagination at the intersections of race and class in a very particular way, in the tension between deep historic investments in seeing the region as "pure white stock" and as deeply impoverished and backward. Meredith McCarroll's Unwhite analyzes the fraught location of Appalachians within the southern and American imaginaries, building on studies of race in literary and cinematic characterizations of the American South. Not only do we know what "rednecks" and "white trash" are, McCarroll argues, we rely on the continued use of such categories in fashioning our broader sense of self and other. Further, we continue to depend upon the existence of the region...