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"Historical fiction, American History and criticism."
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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
Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane : authorship, place, time, and culture
\"One of America's leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane combine analyses of both women to explore their collaborative process and how their books reflect the authors' view of place, time, and culture, expanding the critical discussion of Wilder and Lane beyond the Little house\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Little author in the big woods : a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder
\"Many girls in elementary and middle school fall in love with the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. What they don't always realize is that Wilder's books are autobiographical. This narrative biography describes more of the details of the young Laura's real life as a young pioneer homesteading with her family on many adventurous journeys. This biography, complete with charming illustrations, points out the differences between the fictional series as well as the many similarities. It's a fascinating story of a much-celebrated writer\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Contemporary feminist historical crime fiction
By examining the feminist interventions of contemporary women writers working in this subgenre, Johnsen advances the existing critical discussion of women's crime fiction. The writers studied here bring research expertise to bear on their chosen historical settings, creating a powerful but widely accessible statement about women in history.
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
Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane : authorship, place, time, and culture
The mother-daughter partnership that produced the Little House books has fascinated scholars and readers alike. Now, John E. Miller, one of America's leading authorities on Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane, combines analyses of both women to explore this collaborative process and shows how their books reflect the authors' distinctive views of place, time, and culture. Along the way, he addresses the two most controversial issues for Wilder/Lane aficionados: how much did Lane actually contribute to the writing of the Little House books, and what was Wilder's real attitude toward American Indians. Interpreting these writers in their larger historical and cultural contexts, Miller reconsiders their formidable artistic, political, and literary contributions to American cultural life in the 1930s. He looks at what was happening in 1932—from depression conditions and politics to chain stores and celebrity culture—to shed light on Wilder's life, and he shows how actual \"little houses\" established ideas of home that resonated emotionally for both writers. In considering each woman's ties to history, Miller compares Wilder with Frederick Jackson Turner as a frontier mythmaker and examines Lane's unpublished history of Missouri in the context of a contemporaneous project, Thomas Hart Benton's famous Jefferson City mural. He also looks at Wilder's Missouri Ruralist columns to assess her pre–Little House values and writing skills, and he readdresses her literary treatment of Native Americans. A final chapter shows how Wilder's and Lane's conservative political views found expression in their work, separating Lane's more libertarian bent from Wilder's focus on writing moralist children's fiction. These nine thoughtful essays expand the critical discussion on Wilder and Lane beyond the Little House. Miller portrays them as impassioned and dedicated writers who were deeply involved in the historical changes and political challenges of their times—and contends that questions over the books' authorship do not do justice to either woman's creative investment in the series. Miller demystifies the aura of nostalgia that often prevents modern readers from seeing Wilder as a real-life woman, and he depicts Lane as a kindred artistic spirit, helping readers better understand mother and daughter as both women and authors.
eBook
Shelby Foote
Called the greatest Civil War historian, Shelby Foote began his career as a novelist whose powerful works of fiction rose out of his closeness to life and culture in his native region, the Mississippi Delta country. Later in his career he transformed modern historical prose by his keen sense of the novel. His artistic distance from the elements of regionalism that lie at the heart both of his novels and of his history writing gives his prose great narrative force.
This perceptive study fills the genuine need for a sound critical appreciation of Foote the novelist. After he appeared as a sage commentator in the PBS seriesThe Civil War, the popular acclaim that catapulted Shelby Foote the historian to even greater eminence as an American oracle renewed much deserved interest in his novels and in critically rich assessments such as this one.
eBook
Hard facts : setting and form in the American novel
American culture has often been described in terms of paradigmatic images--the wilderness, the Jeffersonian landscape of family farms, the great industrial cities at the turn of the 19th century. But underlying these cultural ideals are less happy paradoxes.
eBook