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"Historical fiction, American"
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Tremontaine. Season 1
\"A duchess's beauty matched only by her cunning; her husband's dangerous affair with a handsome scholar; a foreigner in a playground of swordplay and secrets; and a mathematical genius on the brink of revolution. Suddenly long-buried lies threaten to come to light and betrayal and treachery run rampant in this story of sparkling wit and political intrigue.\"--Amazon.com.
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Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War
During and after the Civil War, southern women played a
critical role in shaping the South’s evolving collective
memory by penning journals and diaries, historical accounts,
memoirs, and literary interpretations of the war. While a few of
these writings—most notably Mary Chesnut’s diaries
and Margaret Mitchell’s novel,
Gone with the Wind —have been studied in depth by
numerous scholars, until now there has been no comprehensive
examination of Civil War novels by southern women. In this
welcome study, Sharon Talley explores works by fifteen such
writers, illuminating the role that southern women played in
fashioning cultural identity in the region. Beginning with
Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria and Sallie Rochester
Ford’s
Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men , which were
published as the war still raged, Talley offers a chronological
consideration of the novels with informative introductions for
each time period. She examines Reconstruction works by Marion
Harland, Mary Ann Cruse, and Rebecca Harding Davis, novels of the
“Redeemed” South and the turn of the century by Mary
Noailles Murfree, Ellen Glasgow, and Mary Johnston, and
narratives by Evelyn Scott, Margaret Mitchell, and Caroline
Gordon from the Modern period that spanned the two World Wars.
Analysis of Margaret Walker’s
Jubilee (1966), the first critically acclaimed Civil War
novel by an African American woman of the South, as well as other
post–World War II works by Kaye Gibbons, Josephine
Humphreys, and Alice Randall, offers a fitting conclusion to
Talley’s study by addressing the inaccuracies in the
romantic myth of the Old South that
Gone with the Wind most famously engraved on the
nation’s consciousness. Informed by feminist,
poststructural, and cultural studies theory, Talley’s close
readings of these various novels ultimately refute the notion of
a monolithic interpretation of the Civil War, presenting instead
unique and diverse approaches to balancing “fact” and
“fiction” in the long period of artistic production
concerning this singular traumatic event in American history.
Sharon Talley, professor of English at Texas A&M
University–Corpus Christi, is the author of
Ambrose Bierce and the Dance of Death and
Student Companion to Herman Melville . Her articles have
appeared in
American Imago, Journal of Men’s Studies, and
Nineteenth-Century Prose.
eBook
The water dancer : a novel
\"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation family, Thena, his chosen mother, a woman of few words and many secrets, and Sophia, a young woman fighting her own war even as she and Hiram fall in love, he becomes determined to escape the only home he's ever known. So begins an unexpected journey into the covert war on slavery that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, all Hiram wants is to return to the Walker Plantation to free the family he left behind--but to do so, he must first master his magical gift and reconstruct the story of his greatest loss.\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Edna Ferber's Hollywood
Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century—the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era—among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences. In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider—a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.
eBook
Remembering the past in contemporary African American fiction
With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.
eBook
As good as true
\"August 1956. After a night of rage and terror, Anna Nassad wakes to find her abusive husband dead and instinctively hides her bruises and her relief. As the daughter of Syrian immigrants living in segregated Alabama, Anna has never belonged, and now her world is about to erupt. Days before, Anna set in motion an explosive chain of events by allowing the first black postman to deliver the mail to her house. But it's her impulsive act of inviting him inside for a glass of water that raises doubts about Anna's role in her husband's death. As threats and suspicions arise in the angry community, Anna must confront her secrets in the face of devastating turmoil and reconcile her anguished relationship with her daughter. Will she discover the strength to fight for those she loves most, even if it means losing all she's ever known?\"--Amazon.com.
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