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Sitting in Darkness explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and U.S. foreign policy towards its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in U.S. literary history. Many rarely studied fiction authors (such as Ellwood Griest, Ellen Ingraham, George Marion McClellan, and Walter Hines Page) receive generous attention here, and well-known figures such as Albion Tourgee, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Owen Wister, and W. ...
Photographs, lumber, airplanes, hand-hewn coffins—in every William Faulkner novel and short story worldly material abounds. The essays in Faulkner and Material Culture provide a fresh understanding of the things Faulkner brought from the world around him to the one he created. Charles S. Aiken surveys Faulkner's representation of terrain and concludes, contrary to established criticism, that to Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha was not a microcosm of the South but a very particular and quite specifically located place. Jay Watson works with literary theory, philosophy, the history of woodworking and furniture-making, and social and intellectual history to explore how Light in August is tied intimate...
WINNER OF THE 2022 EUDORA WELTY PRIZE Internationally known as a writer, Eudora Welty has as well been spotlighted as a talented photographer. The prevalent idea remains that Welty simply took snapshots before she found her true calling as a renowned fiction writer. But who was Welty as a photographer? What did she see? How and why did she photograph? And what did Welty know about modern photography? In Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty's Photographic Reflections, Annette Trefzer elucidates Welty’s photographic vision and answers these questions by exploring her photographic archive and writings on photography. The photographs Welty took in the 1930s and ’40s frame her visual response t...
Serious Daring is the story of the complementary journeys of two American women artists, celebrated fiction writer Eudora Welty and internationally acclaimed photographer Rosamond Purcell, each of whom initially practiced, but then turned from, the art form ultimately pursued by the other. For both Welty and Purcell, the art realized is full of the art seemingly abandoned. Welty’s short stories and novels use images of photographs, photographers, and photography. Purcell photographed books, texts, and writing. Both women make compelling art out of the seeming tension between literary and visual cultures. Purcell wrote a memoir in which photographs became endnotes. Welty re-emerged as a photographer through the publication of four volumes of what she called her “snapshots,” magnificent black-and-white photographs of small-town Mississippi and New York City life. Serious Daring is a fascinating look at how the road not taken can stubbornly accompany the chosen path, how what is seemingly left behind can become a haunting and vital presence in life and art.
Jay Watson argues that southern literary studies has been overidealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. In Reading for the Body, he calls for the field to be rematerialized and grounded in an awareness of the human body as the site where ideas, including ideas about the U.S. South itself, ultimately happen. Employing theoretical approaches to the body developed by thinkers such as Karl Marx, Colette Guillaumin, Elaine Scarry, and Friedrich Kittler, Watson also draws on histories of bodily representation to mine a century of southern fiction for its insights into problems that have preoccupied the region and nation alike: slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy; the margina...
Performing Auto/biography: Narrating a Life as Activism analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed in five authors’ auto/biographical texts, examining their representations of identities and the public implications of writing individual identity. Exploring the ways race, class, culture, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality might affect the form(s) in which writers choose to write (e.g., memoir, fictional autobiography, poetry), questions how autobiographers challenge notions of genre, truth, and representation. This builds on the argument that constructing identity is a Performing Autobiography performance, one that can simultaneously use and subvert traditional notions of rhetoric and genre....
Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, Sensational Modernism uncovers a rich vein of experimental work by politically progressive artists. Examining images by photographers such as Weegee and Aaron Siskind and fiction by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and Pietro di Donato, Joseph Entin argues that these artists drew attention to the country's most vulnerable residents by using what he calls an "aesthetic of astonishment," focused on startling, graphic images of pain, injury, and prejudice. Traditional portrayals of the poor depicted stoic, passive figures of sentimental suffering or degra...
Operating at the intersection where new technology meets literature, this collection discovers the relationship among image, sound, and touch in the long nineteenth century. The chapters speak to the special mixed-media properties of literature, while exploring the important interconnections of science, technology, and art at the historical moment when media was being theorized, debated, and scrutinized. Each chapter focuses on a specific visual, acoustic, or haptic dimension of media, while also calling attention to the relationships among the three. Famous works such as Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and Shelley's Frankenstein are discussed alongside a range of lesser-known li...
This book's primary task is to test the contemporary value of performance and performativity. Performative Identities in Culture: From Literature to Social Media undertakes this task via a host of chapters on a vast spectrum of performativity-related topics such as: literature (British, American, Welsh), film, art, social media, and sports. Within these contexts, the book raises a number of questions relevant today. How is minority culture constructed and performed in literature? How can one manifest identity in multicultural contexts? How has performativity been transformed in audiovisual media, like film, video games and social media? And, can the digital itself be performative?