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Mary Lee Settle's The Beulah Quintet originates in part from \"Beulah Land,\" a nineteenth-century hymn written by Edgar P Stites; the hymn explicitly connects land with redemption, and in her 1996 introduction to O Beulah Land, Settle recalls having found the \"impassioned theme\" of her book after hearing Burl Ives's rendition of the hymn: \"I still stand in that room in England, and still hear that hunger for a land hoped for, fought over, and never quite found - what we think of as the American Dream, lost, defiled, complicated and used by the cynical, and still so deeply sought by the rest of us...\" Some lines from the hymn - \"I've reached the land of corn and wine, /And all its riches freely mine,\" - become ironic in the last three books of the quintet, as the word \"mine\" takes on new meaning with the implementation of salt mining in Know Nothing and the coal mining that nearly ruins the region in The Scapegoat and in The Killing Gmünd.

Rose is a different kind of mother, and Eddie is a different kind of son. Because of the interaction between parents and children at the cemetery, particularly the interaction between Rose and Eddie, Hannah is hopeful that future generations will enjoy a form of freedom from family expectations that she and others before her could not.

Roberts scholars agree that the novel focuses on the inner life of its protagonist, Ellen Chesser, and that external environmental and social factors serve as backdrop for illuminating her spiritual growth as she matures into womanhood.2 Clearly, The Time of Man (1926) is neither political propaganda nor an overt piece of protest fiction. In a book-length study of Roberts, Rovit raises a valid question concerning Ellen Chesser's ability to function as an everyman figure, since her poor-white experiences were distinctly unlike those of Roberts' contemporary readers.4 In From Tobacco Road to Route 66, Cook even goes a step farther, stating: it is apparent that she [Ellen] will be an unlikely tool for propagandists out to reform the poor white's lot.. ..The reader is bound to respond with revulsion to the filth, vermin, pain, and hunger that Ellen accepts as the normal circumstances of her life and to be aware how much of her superb energy is being sapped battling needless obstacles.5 Ellen and the other characters in The Time of Man are necessarily concerned with meeting basic human needs that Roberts' audience would have taken (and probably still take) for granted, but the novel's readers also witness poor-white characters experiencing a variety of universal human emotions here, including vanity, jealousy, sadness, loneliness, and fear.

This dissertation seeks to situate Settle's The Beulah Quintet within a Southern tradition of writing through establishing the work's relationship to a prominent Southern theme—the individual's concern with both personal and regional history—while simultaneously examining some of the ways in which the piece diverges from more traditional depictions of the individual struggle to come to terms with identity and world. Its ideas are shaped in part by narrative studies, masculinist studies, and ecocriticism. The first portion of Chapter I provides an overview of Settle's perception of history as well as the means through which she reconstructs history in the quintet; the second portion of the chapter examines Settle's depiction of the human tendency to rewrite personal history. In its entirety, the chapter is concerned with why and how history is \"forgotten\" and revised as well as the visible and psychological effects of such forgetting. Chapter II considers relationships between mothers and sons in the quintet; I foreground a series of relationships depicted as having a negative effect on the male characters and, ultimately, on the region's inhabitants as a whole. There is a direct connection among the forgotten history of the valley, the dangerous female figures that drive that history and the shaping of their sons, and the devastating effects that those sons have on the natural world. Chapter III contemplates the increasing human destruction of the Beulah Valley as depicted in the quintet. Although the New World offers some of the quintet's earliest characters the opportunity to begin anew, those characters and their descendants destroy the region, and Beulah's inhabitants degenerate through their pollution of the earth. By the final book, Settle depicts the future of the valley's inhabitants as being directly tied to the fate of the land. My conclusion considers Settle's intimation that there is the possibility of redemption for both humans and the environment at the end of The Beulah Quintet because of the reconstruction of forgotten history. Settle's female character, Hannah McKarkle, provides an alternative to Quentin Compson, and Settle provides an alternative to the Faulknerian school of Southern history as necessarily tragic.

Esteemed critic Blanche Gelfant's brilliant companion gathers together lucid essays on major writers and themes by some of the best literary critics in the United States. Part 1 is comprised of articles on stories that share a particular theme, such as “Working Class Stories” or “Gay and Lesbian Stories.” The heart of the book, however, lies in Part 2, which contains more than one hundred pieces on individual writers and their work, including Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Eudora Welty, Andre Debus, Zora Neal Hurston, Anne Beattie, Bharati Mukherjee, J. D. Salinger, and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as engaging pieces on the promising new writers to come on the scene.