Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
6
result(s) for
"American literature Louisiana New Orleans History and criticism."
Sort by:
Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories
Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories posits that the Crescent City and the surrounding Louisiana bayous were a logical setting for the literary exploration of crucial social problems in America.
Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories is a study of four volumes of interrelated short stories set in New Orleans and the surrounding Louisiana bayous: Kate Chopin’s Bayou Folk ; George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days ; Grace King’s Balcony Stories ; and Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories . James Nagel argues that the conflicts and themes in these stories cannot be understood without a knowledge of the unique historical context of the founding of Louisiana, its four decades of rule by the Spanish, the Louisiana Purchase and the resulting cultural transformations across the region, Napoleonic law, the Code Noir, the plaçage tradition, the immigration of various ethnic and natural groups into the city, and the effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. All of these historical factors energize and enrich the fiction of this important region.
The literary context of these volumes is also central to understanding their place in literary history. They are short-story cycles—collections of short fiction that contain unifying settings, recurring characters or character types, and central themes and motifs. They are also examples of the “local color” tradition in fiction, a movement that has been much misunderstood. Nagel maintains that regional literature was meant to be the highest form of American writing, not the lowest, and its objective was to capture the locations, folkways, values, dialects, conflicts, and ways of life in the various regions of the country in order to show that the lives of common citizens were sufficiently important to be the subject of serious literature.
Finally, Nagel shows that New Orleans provided a profoundly rich and complex setting for the literary exploration of some of the most crucial social problems in America, including racial stratification, social caste, economic exploitation, and gender roles, all of which were undergoing rapid transformation at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
eBook
Creole Drama
Recognizing theatres as sites of cultural exchange that could cross oceans and borders, Creole Drama offers not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans but an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks helped create the American nation.
eBook
Bounce
Over the course of the twentieth century, African Americans in New Orleans helped define the genres of jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, and funk. In recent decades, younger generations of New Orleanians have created a rich and dynamic local rap scene, which has revolved around a danceoriented style called “bounce.” Hiphop has been the latest conduit for a “New Orleans sound” that lies at the heart of many of the city’s bestknown contributions to earlier popular music genres. Bounce, while globally connected and constantly evolving, reflects an enduring cultural continuity that reaches back and builds on the city’s rich musical and cultural traditions. In this book, the popular music scholar and filmmaker Matt Miller explores the ways in which participants in New Orleans’s hiphop scene have collectively established, contested, and revised a distinctive style of rap that exists at the intersection of deeply rooted vernacular music traditions and the modern, globalized economy of commercial popular music. Like other forms of grassroots expressive culture in the city, New Orleans rap is a site of intense aesthetic and economic competition that reflects the creativity and resilience of the city’s poor and workingclass African Americans.
eBook
American Heteroglossia: Open-Cell Regionalism and the New Orleans Short Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Rather, Chesnutt, Dunbar, and Dunbar-Nelson each negotiated a literary tradition's expectations of an authentic African-American culture with the versions of black experience they encountered, experiences in which racial violence and social segregation were central.2 In their fiction they challenged core presumptions about regionalism, particularly its nativist isolationism and vaunted quaintness. Rather, they have argued after Richard Brodhead and Amy Kaplan that to the contrary, regionalist literature was largely complicit with enshrining nationalist narratives.11 Amy Kaplan writes that regionalism' s insertion as a staple form of popular print culture in the North led to a form of Northern solidification, \"as an imagined community by consuming images of rural 'others' as both a nostalgic point of origin and measure of cosmopolitan development\" (251).
Journal Article