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"American fiction Southern states History and criticism."
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Disturbing Indians
How Faulkner, Welty, Lytle, and Gordon reimagined and
reconstructed the Native American past in their
work.
In this book, Annette Trefzer argues that not only have
Native Americans played an active role in the construction of
the South’s cultural landscape—despite a history of
colonization, dispossession, and removal aimed at rendering
them invisible—but that their under-examined presence in
southern literature also provides a crucial avenue for a
post-regional understanding of the American South. William
Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Andrew Lytle, and Caroline Gordon
created works about the Spanish conquest of the New World, the
Cherokee frontier during the Revolution, the expansion into the
Mississippi Territory, and the slaveholding societies of the
American southeast. They wrote 100 years after the forceful
removal of Native Americans from the southeast but consistently
returned to the idea of an \"Indian frontier,\" each articulating
a different vision and discourse about Native
Americans—wholesome and pure in the vision of some,
symptomatic of hybridity and universality for others.
Trefzer contends that these writers engage in a double
discourse about the region and nation: fabricating regional
identity by invoking the South’s \"native\" heritage and
pointing to issues of national guilt, colonization, westward
expansion, and imperialism in a period that saw the US sphere
of influence widen dramatically. In both cases, the \"Indian\"
signifies regional and national self-definitions and
contributes to the shaping of cultural, racial, and national
\"others.\" Trefzer employs the idea of archeology in two senses:
quite literally the excavation of artifacts in the South during
the New Deal administration of the 1930s (a surfacing of
material culture to which each writer responded) and archeology
as a method for exploring texts she addresses (literary digs
into the textual strata of America’s literature and its
cultural history).
eBook
The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction
This work offers a rich comparative examination of Irish and American Southern plantation literatures and their respective representations of race and nation, gender and sexuality, region and landscape, and the gothic imagination.
eBook
Novel sounds : Southern fiction in the age of rock and roll
\"Around the time that Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley put their electric spin on Southern vernacular ballads, a canonical group of white American authors native to rock's birthplace began to write fiction about the electrification of those ballads, translating into literary form key cultural changes that gave rise to the infectious music coming out of their region. In [this book], Florence Dore tells the story of how these forms of expression became intertwined and shows how Southern writers turned to rock music and its technologies--tape, radio, vinyl--to develop the 'rock novel'\"--Publisher marketing.
Book
Still in Print
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 and explore the region's promise for the future. Four novels reconsider the Civil War and its aftermath as Charles Frazier, Kaye Gibbons, Josephine Humphreys, and Pam Durban revisit the past and add fresh insights to contemporary discussions of race and gender through their excursions into history. The novels by Steve Yarbrough, Larry Brown, Chris Offutt, Barry Hannah, and James Lee Burke demonstrate a keen sense of place, rooted in a South marked by fundamentalism, poverty, violence, and rampant prejudice but still capable of promise for some unseen future. The comic fiction of George Singleton, Clyde Edgerton, James Wilcox, Donald Harington, and Lewis Nordan shows how Southern humor still encompasses customs and speech reflected in concrete places. Ron Rash, Richard Ford, and Cormac McCarthy probe the depths of human existence, often with disturbing results, as they write about protagonists cut off from their own humanity and desperate to reconnect with the human race. Diverse in content but unified in genre, these particular novels have been nominated by the contributors to Still in Print for long-term survival as among the best modern representations of the Southern novel.
eBook
Where the new world is : literature about the U.S. South at global scales
\"Where the New World Is assesses how fiction published since 1980 has resituated the U.S. South globally and how earlier twentieth-century writing already had done so in ways traditional southern literary studies tended to ignore. Martyn Bone argues that this body of fiction has, over the course of some eighty years, challenged received readings and understandings of the U.S. South as a fixed place largely untouched by immigration (or even internal migration) and economic globalization. The writers discussed by Bone emphasize how migration and labor have reconfigured the region's relation to the nation and a range of transnational scales: hemispheric (Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti), transatlantic/Black Atlantic (Denmark, England, Mauritania), and transpacific/global southern (Australia, China, Vietnam). Writers under consideration include Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, John Oliver Killens, Russell Banks, Erna Brodber, Cynthia Shearer, Ha Jin, Monique Truong, Lan Cao, Toni Morrison, Peter Matthiessen, Dave Eggers, and Laila Lalami. The book also seeks to resituate southern studies by drawing on theories of \"scale\" that originated in human geography. In this way, Bone also offers a new paradigm in which the U.S. South is thoroughly engaged with a range of other scales from the local to the global, making both literature about the region and southern studies itself truly transnational in scope\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Reading for the Body
Jay Watson argues that southern literary studies has been overidealized and dominated by intellectual history for too long. InReading 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 marginalization of women; the impact of modernization; the issue of cultural authority and leadership; and the legacy of the Vietnam War. He focuses on the specific bodily attributes of hand, voice, and blood and the deeply embodied experiences of pain, illness, pregnancy, and war to offer new readings of a distinguished group of literary artists who turned their attention to the South: Mark Twain, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walker Percy.In producing an intensely embodied U.S. literature these writers, Watson argues, were by turns extending and interrogating a centuries-old tradition in U.S. print culture, in which the recalcitrant materiality of the body serves as a trope for the regional alterity of the South.Reading for the Bodymakes a powerful case for the body as an important methodological resource for a new southern studies.
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Sitting in Darkness
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 Tourgée, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Owen Wister, and W. E. B. Du Bois are illuminated in significant new ways. The book\\'s readings seek to synthesize developments in literary and cultural studies, ranging through New Criticism, New Historicism, postcolonial studies, black studies, and \"whiteness\" studies.
This volume posits and answers significant questions. In what ways did the \"uplift\" projects of Reconstruction-their ideals and their contradictions-affect U.S. colonial policies in the new territories after 1898? How can fiction that treated these historical changes help us understand them? What relevance does this period have for us in the present, during a moment of great literary innovation and strong debate over how well the most powerful country in the world uses its resources?
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