The Female Tradition in Southern Literature

The Female Tradition in Southern Literature PDF

Author: Carol S. Manning

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780252064449

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This collection of critical essays examines the contributions to and influences on literature that have been made by Southern women writers.--From publisher description.

The History of Southern Women's Literature

The History of Southern Women's Literature PDF

Author: Carolyn Perry

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-03-01

Total Pages: 724

ISBN-13: 9780807127537

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

Southern Women Writers

Southern Women Writers PDF

Author: Tonette Bond Inge

Publisher: University Alabama Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Essays on contemporary women writers of the South: Margaret Walker, Mary Lee Settle, Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, Joan Williams, Maya Angelou, Shirley Ann Grau, Doris Betts, Sonia Sanchez, Gail Godwin, Sylvia Wilkinson, Anne Tyler, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Lee Smith.

Southern Mothers

Southern Mothers PDF

Author: Nagueyalti Warren

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1999-10-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780807125083

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Southern Mothers, a collection of critical essays by prominent southern literary scholars, examines the significance of motherhood in southern fiction. The belle, the mammy, religion, and racism are several of the distinctive threads with which southern women writers have woven the fabric of their stories. Bringing southern motherhood into focus -- with all its peculiarities of attitude and tradition -- the essays speak to both the established and the unconventional modes of motherhood that are typical in southern writing and probe the extent to which southern women writers have rejected or embraced, supported or challenged the individual, social, and cultural understanding and institution of motherhood.

Southern Women's Writing

Southern Women's Writing PDF

Author: Mary Weaks-Baxter

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 9780813014111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Discusses the lives of major southern women authors and presents an example of the work of each.

The Companion to Southern Literature

The Companion to Southern Literature PDF

Author: Joseph M. Flora

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2001-11-01

Total Pages: 1096

ISBN-13: 9780807126929

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Selected as an Outstanding Reference Source by the Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association There are many anthologies of southern literature, but this is the first companion. Neither a survey of masterpieces nor a biographical sourcebook, The Companion to Southern Literature treats every conceivable topic found in southern writing from the pre-Columbian era to the present, referencing specific works of all periods and genres. Top scholars in their fields offer original definitions and examples of the concepts they know best, identifying the themes, burning issues, historical personalities, beloved icons, and common or uncommon stereotypes that have shaped the most significant regional literature in memory. Read the copious offerings straight through in alphabetical order (Ancestor Worship, Blue-Collar Literature, Caves) or skip randomly at whim (Guilt, The Grotesque, William Jefferson Clinton). Whatever approach you take, The Companion’s authority, scope, and variety in tone and interpretation will prove a boon and a delight. Explored here are literary embodiments of the Old South, New South, Solid South, Savage South, Lazy South, and “Sahara of the Bozart.” As up-to-date as grit lit, K Mart fiction, and postmodernism, and as old-fashioned as Puritanism, mules, and the tall tale, these five hundred entries span a reach from Lady to Lesbian Literature. The volume includes an overview of every southern state’s belletristic heritage while making it clear that the southern mind extends beyond geographical boundaries to form an essential component of the American psyche. The South’s lavishly rich literature provides the best means of understanding the region’s deepest nature, and The Companion to Southern Literature will be an invaluable tool for those who take on that exciting challenge. Description of Contents 500 lively, succinct articles on topics ranging from Abolition to Yoknapatawpha 250 contributors, including scholars, writers, and poets 2 tables of contents — alphabetical and subject — and a complete index A separate bibliography for most entries

Dirt and Desire

Dirt and Desire PDF

Author: Patricia Yaeger

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-02-15

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 0226944921

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The story of southern writing—the Dixie Limited, if you will—runs along an iron path: an official narrative of a literature about community, about place and the past, about miscegenation, white patriarchy, and the epic of race. Patricia Yaeger dynamites the rails, providing an entirely new set of categories through which to understand southern literature and culture. For Yaeger, works by black and white southern women writers reveal a shared obsession with monstrosity and the grotesque and with the strange zones of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the workings of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all too familiar everyday. Yaeger also excavates a southern fascination with dirt—who owns it, who cleans it, and whose bodies are buried in it. Yaeger's brilliant, theoretically informed readings of Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and Eudora Welty (among many others) explode the mystifications of southern literary tradition and forge a new path for southern studies. The book won the Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award given by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature.

Being Ugly

Being Ugly PDF

Author: Monica Carol Miller

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2017-05-08

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 080716562X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In the South, one notion of “being ugly” implies inappropriate or coarse behavior that transgresses social norms of courtesy. While popular stereotypes of the region often highlight southern belles as the epitome of feminine power, women writers from the South frequently stray from this convention and invest their fiction with female protagonists described as ugly or chastised for behaving that way. Through this divergence, “ugly” can be a force for challenging the strictures of normative southern gender roles and marriage economies. In Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion, Monica Carol Miller reveals how authors from Margaret Mitchell to Monique Truong employ “ugly” characters to upend the expectations of patriarchy and open up more possibilities for southern female identity. Previous scholarship often conflates ugliness with such categories as the grotesque, plain, or abject, but Miller disassociates these negative descriptors from a group of characters created by southern women writers. Focusing on how such characters appear prone to rebellious and socially inappropriate behavior, Miller argues that ugliness subverts assumptions about gender by identifying those who are unsuitable for the expected roles of marriage and motherhood. As opposed to familiar courtship and marriage plots, Miller locates in fiction by southern women writers an alternative genealogy, the ugly plot. This narrative tradition highlights female characters whose rebellion offers a space for re-imagining alternative lives and households in opposition to the status quo. Reading works by canonical writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, along with recent texts by contemporary authors like Helen Ellis, Lee Smith, and Jesmyn Ward, Being Ugly offers an important new perspective on how southern women writers confront regressive ideologies that insist upon limited roles for women.

A Southern Weave of Women

A Southern Weave of Women PDF

Author: Linda Tate

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780820318509

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A Southern Weave of Women is one of the first sustained treatments of the generation women writers who came of age in the post-World War II South as well as one of the first to situate southern literature fully within a multicultural context

Women in Southern Literature

Women in Southern Literature PDF

Author: Patricia Sweeney

Publisher: Greenwood

Published: 1986-04-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0313249725

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This index identifies some 1,000 female characters who appear in novels, short stories, and plays about the American South. All of the major and some of the minor characters created by the most distinguished Southern writers are included. (Authors who wrote about the South but who were not born or raised there are excluded.) All characters are listed alphabetically, followed by a short description of their character traits and/or role. This is followed by the work(s) of literature in which the character appears and the author's name. Sweeney's introduction includes an explanation of the scope, organization, and rationale of the work. Also covered are the depictions of women by Southern writers, including stereotypical patterns, racial differences, regional diversity, and developmental progress or changes in portraiture. Following the index is an appendix listing fifteen categories of Southern female characters. The labels for these categories are drawn from the literature itself. Author and title indexes conclude the work.