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Southern Writers at Century's End

Author: Jeffrey J. Folks

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0813189519

Since the end of World War II, the South has experienced a greater awareness of growth and of its accompanying tensions than other regions of the United States. The rapid change that climaxed with the war in Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights demonstrations, and Watergate has forced the traditional South to come to terms with social upheaval. As the essays collected in Southern Writers at Century's End point out, southern writing: since 1975 reflects the confusion and violence that have characterized late-twentieth-century public culture. These essays consider the work of twenty-one of the foremost southern writers whose most important fiction has appeared in the last quarter of this century. As the region's contemporary writers have begun to gain a wide audience, critics have begun to distinguish what Hugh Holman has called "the fresh, the vital, and the new" in southern literary culture. Southern Writers at Century's End is the first volume to take an extensive look at the current generation of southern writers. Authors considered include: James Lee Burke, Fred Chappell, Robert Drake, Andre Dubus, Clyde Edgerton, Richard Ford, Kaye Gibbons, John Grisham, Barry Hannah, Mary Hood, Josephine Humphreys, Randall Kenan, Richard Marius, Bobbie Ann Mason, Cormac McCarthy, Tim McLaurin, T.R. Pearson, Lee Smith, Anne Tyle,r Alice Walker, and James Wilcox.

South to A New Place

Author: Suzanne W. Jones

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 9780807128404

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Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

Author: M. Thomas Inge

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-02-01

Total Pages: 534

ISBN-13: 1469616645

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Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures--a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here. Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

The Southern Way of Life

Author: Charles Reagan Wilson

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2022-11-30

Total Pages: 615

ISBN-13: 1469664992

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How does one begin to understand the idea of a distinctive southern way of life—a concept as enduring as it is disputed? In this examination of the American South in national and global contexts, celebrated historian Charles Reagan Wilson assesses how diverse communities of southerners have sought to define the region's identity. Surveying three centuries of southern regional consciousness across many genres, disciplines, and cultural strains, Wilson considers and challenges prior presentations of the region, advancing a vision of southern culture that has always been plural, dynamic, and complicated by race and class. Structured in three parts, The Southern Way of Life takes readers on a journey from the colonial era to the present, from when complex ideas of "southern civilization" rooted in slaveholding and agrarianism dominated to the twenty-first-century rise of a modern, multicultural "southern living." As Wilson shows, there is no singular or essential South but rather a rich tapestry woven with contestations, contingencies, and change.

South to the Future

Author: Fred C. Hobson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780820324111

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Until recently, the American South has often been treated in isolation by historians and literary critics. In these essays five scholars of southern history and literature evaluate elements of contemporary--and future--southern experience, including place, community, culture, class, gender, and racial roles. Fred Hobson observes in his introductory essay that the U.S. South must be seen in relation to a larger world--the Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as European countries with a similar grounding in hardship and defeat. Moreover, the South can no longer be viewed in black-and-white terms--especially if the subject is race. Joel Williamson's essay challenges fellow historians to broaden their purview by getting acquainted with Gone with the Wind, Elvis Presley, and other phenomena of southern culture(s). Linda Wagner-Martin discusses the innovative ways in which contemporary southern writers such as Charles Frazier take on traditional southern concerns and shows us how "place becomes space" for Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, and other southern-born writers whose works are often set outside the geographical South. Thadious Davis looks at the "youngsters" of southern poetry, fiction, and drama, revealing how their work reflects a racially and ethnically mixed, digitized, and otherwise reconfigured South. In the writings of Shay Youngblood, Randall Kenan, Donna Tartt, Mona Lisa Salloy, and others, one can see the collapsing of distinctions between the literary and the popular, and a greater comfort with social fluidity and mobility. The concluding essay by Edward Ayers, set in 2076, offers a witty glimpse of things-perhaps-to-come. Through a series of short dispatches from a sixteen-year-old narrator of Scottish-Ghanian-Honduran-Korean-Cherokee descent, Ayers transports us to the Consolidated South that counts Incarceration Incorporated among its largest employers. As these writings signal new depths and directions in southern historical and literary studies, they compose a witty and erudite album of snapshots, revealing a region on the verge of big changes.

American Writers

Author: Elizabeth H. Oakes

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1438108095

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"American Writers focuses on the rich diversity of American novelists

Understanding Randall Kenan

Author: James A. Crank

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2019-03-28

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1611179599

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The first book-length study of the life and writings of the critically acclaimed Southern writer Randall Kenan is an American author best known for his novel A Visitation of Spirits and his collection of stories Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was a nominee for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction, and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Whiting Writers Award, Sherwood Anderson Award, John Dos Passos Award, Rome Prize, and North Carolina Award for Literature. Understanding Randall Kenan is the first book-length critical study of Kenan, offering a brief biography and an exploration of his considerable oeuvre—memoir, short stories, novels, journalism, folklore, and essays. Kenan's writing can be complex and sometimes highly stylized while covering a broad range of topics, though he often explores African Americans' complicated relationships, specifically as they struggle to make connections along other axes of class, gender, and sexual identity. Crank explores these themes and how they influence Kenan's work through a personal interview with the author.

Encyclopedia of the American Novel

Author: Abby H. P. Werlock

Publisher: Infobase Learning

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 3854

ISBN-13: 143814069X

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Praise for the print edition:" ... no other reference work on American fiction brings together such an array of authors and texts as this.

The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction

Author: Martyn Bone

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-06-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780807130537

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For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.