Bøger i Southern Literary Studies serien

From the novels of Toni Morrison to the music of Beyonce Knowles, the cultural prevalence of a transnational black identity, as created by African American women, is more than a product of geographic mobility. Rather, as author Simone C. Drake shows, these constructions illuminate our understanding of a chronically marginalized demographic.

Never in its long history has the South provided an entirely comfortable home for the intellectual. In this thought-provoking contribution to the field of southern studies, Tara Powell considers the evolving ways that major post-World War II southern writers have portrayed intellectuals.

Provides the most comprehensive treatment of autobiographies by women in the American South. This long-anticipated addition to Peggy Prenshaw's study of southern literature spans the twentieth century as she provides an in-depth look at the life-writing of eighteen women authors.

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. The book portrays Morrison as a historiographer bridging the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins.

An arresting comparative analysis, Prophets of Recognition invites readers to consider four well-known post-World War II American novels, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter.

In these interviews, and in the forty-three splendid black-and-white photographs that accompany them, we move through William Faulkner's home territory and encounter the sources of his sense of place and its past: antebellum Rowan Oak; old plantation homes and dogtrot houses; narrow one-lane bridges; country churches and cemeteries.

In this study, Ruth D. Weston probes the whole of Eudora Welty's work to reveal the writer's close relationship to the gothic tradition. Specifically, Weston shows how Welty employs the theme of enclosure and escape and settings that convey a sense of mystery, gothic adaptations both, to create certain narrative techniques in her fiction.

Confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s.

Examines the often-overlooked and undervalued impact of the US South on the origins and development of the detective genre and film noir. This wide-ranging collection engages with ongoing discussions about genre, gender, social justice, critical race theory, popular culture, cinema, and mass media.

Hubert McAlexander's accomplished portrait of Peter Taylor (1917-1994) achieves a remarkable intimacy with this central figure in the history of the American short story and one of the greatest southern writers of his time.

Through Dr Edgar Wiggin Francisco's vivid childhood recollections, Ledgers of History offers a compelling portrait of the future Nobel Laureate near the midpoint of his legendary career, and also charts a significant discovery that will inevitably lead to revisions in historical and critical scholarship on Faulkner and his writings.

From 1943 to 1953, William Styron wrote over one hundred letters to William C. Styron, Sr, detailing his adventures, his works in progress, and his ruminations on the craft of writing. In Letters to My Father, Styron biographer James L.W. West III collects this correspondence for the first time.

Traces a line of southern writers from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, finding that an obsessive need to defend the South and the oft-noted "rage to explain" drove some creative writers to make forays into history and biography in an effort to enter a more public sphere where they could influence interpretations of the past.

Often compared to William Faulkner, renowned American writer William Humphrey (1924-1997) sought to shatter myths about the South in acclaimed novels and in his voluminous short stories, critical essays, and memoirs. This collection of Humphrey's best letters deserves space on the bookshelf alongside his earlier works.

Focusing on the relationship between racial paternalism and social class in American novels written after World War II, Brannon Costello asserts that well into the twentieth century, attitudes and behaviours associated with an idealized version of agrarian antebellum aristocracy were believed to be essential for white southerners.

Examines African American literature's critique of American law concerning matters of property, paying particular attention to the stereotypical image of the black thief. Using critical race theory, King builds a powerful argument that the stereotype of the black thief is an inevitable byproduct of American law, politics, and social customs.

Lewis P. Simpson towers among scholars of American literary studies, as an intellectual historian of the South and American literary culture and a revered essayist. His last book, Imagining Our Time, offers a wide-ranging, erudite, and enlightening look at the culture of letters in American society.

Josephine Pinckney (1895-1957) was an award-winning, best-selling author whose work critics frequently compared to that of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Isak Dinesen. Barbara Bellows has produced the first biography of this private woman and emotionally complex writer, whose life story is also the history of a place and time.

When Scarlett O'Hara fluttered her lashes, did she threaten only the gentleman in her parlour or the very culture that produced her? Examining the "bad belle" as a recurring character, this book finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within.

In America's twentieth century, there is no man of letters more versatile, distinguished, and influential than the poet, novelist, editor, critic, social commentator, and teacher Robert Penn Warren. The most intimate of Warren's "letters", his personal correspondence, now join his published canon under William Bedford Clark's supervision.

Situates Mississippi writer Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849-1883) as an astute cultural observer throughout the 1870s and 1880s who portrayed the discord and uneasiness of the Reconstruction era in her fiction and nonfiction works.

Presents an innovative study of Flannery O'Connor's fiction by exploring the dialogic forces at work in her writing. Drawing on the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, Robert Brinkmeyer offers an explanation for the great depth and power of O'Connor's work, paying particular attention to the ways her art and audience bear upon her regnant Catholic vision.

Shows how Robert Penn Warren's work, his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism, is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual.

In this groundbreaking study, Kathaleen Amende considers the works and lives of late-twentieth-century southern women writers to explore how conservative Christian ideals of femininity shaped notions of religion, sexuality, and power in the South.

Provides an indispensable glimpse of Warren the writer and the man, covering a crucial decade in his life. Thoroughly annotated and scrupulously researched, this volume captures Warren in an extraordinary phase in his life and career, reaching his maturity and making many commitments at once yet pursuing them all with a seemingly boundless energy.

Two Covenants serves to expand the definition of the American South by focusing on the contributions of Jews to the culture. While concerned with established concepts such as ethnicity and region, McGraw raises many questions that illustrate the complexity of southern Jewishness and also considers literary representations.

One of the most striking parts of Robert Penn Warren's novel All the King's Men is Chapter 4, in which narrator Jack Burden tells the story of his distant relative Cass Mastern. James Perkins fully explores how this episode supplies the crucial piece to a puzzle surrounding Warren's novel, tracing the story's evolution.

By critical consensus, Horton Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle - a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays. Drawing on a range of sources, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal oeuvre but also in the canon of American drama.

Hamilton Basso (1904-1964) was a novelist and literary critic with "The New Republic" and "The New Yorker". This is an integrated discussion of his life and work, using letters, diaries, manuscripts and interviews with family and friends.

The first full realization of the family saga in the southern tradition, Stephens says, was George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes (1880). Stephens gives an extensive tour of twentieth-century authors who have used and further developed the southern family saga. He examines the works of writers such as T. S. Stribling and William Faulkner, who after the First World War reinterpreted the Civil War and its consequences in terms of a displaced inheritance; Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle, who built on the displacement motif to show family decline; Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Shirley Ann Grau, who in focusing on family stories transmitted by women explored implications of the matriarchal-patriarchal conflict resonating through generations; and Margaret Walker, Alex Haley, Ernest Gaines, and Toni Morrison, who showed the black family's struggle to find a place in history and later in memories of legendary Africa. Authors whom Stephens identifies as third-generation writers, such as Reynolds Price and Lee Smith, reach beyond history in their sagas to find moments of mythic vision, or they reduce family and public history to the pastless present of popular culture. The literary tradition of the family saga thrives in the South today, Stephens says, because there exists an operative context in which to read the saga: namely, some version of providential order, which affords glimpses of purpose beyond the daily struggles of generations. The Family Saga in the South will make an inestimable contribution to understanding this vital tradition in southern letters while pointing the way for study of the genre in other cultures.