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"Jan Nordby Gretlund has long been an especially keen observer of the Southern literary landscape. In these essays Gretlund zeroes in on key themes that have shaped the Southern literary imagination, providing insightful readings of individual writers and texts. Wide-ranging and discerning, Gretlund's essays reveal a discriminating and passionate critic at work on the subject that he loves and admires." -- Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., Inst. for Southern Studies, U. of South Carolina *** "This is a characteristically robust and clear sighted series of essays, offering an invaluable guide to the fiction of the American South. Jan Nordby Gretlund registers the energy, vitality and sheer range of Southern writing; he also manages to capture what makes that writing so distinctive and extraordinary. Gretlund is one of the leading international figures in Southern literary studies; and this collection - which will be of interest to both specialists and those new to the subject - will surely enhance his reputation." -- Richard Gray, U. of Essex, Fellow of the British Academy
Remarkably removed from the devotional, certifying, and celebratory view of the South that has dominated books of this genre, The Southern State of Mind addresses the question of whether inherited Southern values, problems, and contradictions have survived the onslaught of modernization."--BOOK JACKET.
An insightful guidebook to some of the best examples of modern Southern fiction, as selected by an international group of critics In Still in Print, eighteen southern novels published since 1997 fall under the careful scrutiny of an international cast of accomplished literary critics to identify the very best of recent writings in the genre. These essays highlight the praiseworthy efforts of a pantheon of novelists celebrating and challenging regionality, unearthing manifestations of the past in the present, and looking to the future with wit and healthy skepticism. Organized around shared themes of history, place, humor, and malaise, the novels discussed here interrogate southern culture an...
Fourteen Southern storytellers reveal their influences, methods and daily routines, and struggles with the writing process Jan Nordby Gretlund has been studying the literature of the American South for some fifty years, and his outsider's perspective as a European scholar has made him an intellectually acute witness of both the literature and its creators. Whether it is their language and reflexive storytelling or the craft and techniques by which writers transform life and experience into art that fascinates Gretlund, elements of their fiction led to his interviews with the fourteen storytellers featured in Southern Writers Bear Witness. Gretlund believes a good interview will always reveal...
Brinkmeyer Jr. on Richard Ford's The Lay of the LandRichard Gray on Cormac McCarthy's The Road
In this book, eleven scholars “take their stand” on the controversial issue of disease as it occurs in the context of the American South. Playing on the popular vision of the South as an ill region on several levels, the European and American contributors interpret various aspects of the regional “sickly” culture as not so much southern “problems”, but, rather, southern opportunities, or else, springboards to yet another of the South’s cultural revitalizations, “health”. As Thomas Ærvold Bjerre and Beata Zawadka note in their introduction, the so-called “Healthy South” has never been an easy topic for scholars dealing with the region. One reason for this is that resear...
In 1962, Walker Percy (1916--1990) made a dramatic entrance onto the American literary scene when he won the National Book Award for fiction with his first novel, The Moviegoer. A physician, philosopher, and devout Catholic, Percy dedicated his life to understanding the mixed and somewhat contradictory foundations of American life as a situation faced by the wandering and won-dering human soul. His controversial works combined existential questioning, scientific investigation, the insight of the southern stoic, and authentic religious faith to produce a singular view of humanity's place in the cosmos that ranks among the best American political thinking. An authoritative guide to the politic...
The first chronological overview of O'Connor criticism from the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, in 1952 to the present.
This collection offers a fresh approach to the work of Cormac McCarthy, one of the most important contemporary American authors. Essays focus on his work across the genres and/or in constellation with other writers and artists, presenting not only a different "angle" on the work, but setting him within a broader literary and artistic context. Such an approach offers a view of McCarthy that is strikingly different to previous collections that have dealt with the work in an almost exclusively "single author" and/or "single genre" mode. McCarthy’s novels are increasingly regarded as amongst the most rich, the most complex, and the most insightful of all recent literary responses to prevailing...
Newcomers to the South often remark that southerners, at least white southerners, are still fighting the Civil War -- a strange preoccupation considering that the war formally ended more than one hundred and thirty-five years ago and fewer than a third of southerners today can claim an ancestor who actually fought in the conflict. But even if the war is far removed both in time and genealogy, it survives in the hearts of many of the region's residents and often in national newspaper headlines concerning battle flags, racial justice, and religious conflicts. In this sweeping narrative of the South from the Civil War to the present, noted historian David Goldfield contemplates the roots of sou...