Southern Literary Studies – serie

Biographical sketches of 378 writers associated with the American South are included in this important new reference work. Compiled by 172 scholars, these summaries--many of which are not readily available elsewhere--provide in their total effect a brief history of southern literature from colonial times to the present.The volume is, in part, a companion to A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed.), a work that has become a standard reference for anyone seriously interested in the literature of the South. With its wealth of essential biographical information on the region's writers, both major and minor, this new guide will take its place alongside that earlier volume as an invaluable aid to the study of southern writing. Especially useful will be complete listings of the first printings of the books by each writer provided after the respective summaries.Included as contributors of the individual biographical summaries are most of the better-known scholars of southern literature, plus a number of promising young scholars. The editors, each of whom is an outstanding scholar in southern literary studies, are:

Kate Chopin was a nationally acclaimed short story artist of the local colour school when she in 1899 shocked the American reading public with The Awakening, a novel which much resembles Madame Bovary. Though the critics praised the artistic excellence of the book, it was generally condemned for its objective treatment of the sensuous, independent heroine. Deeply hurt by the censure, Mrs. Chopin wrote little more, and she was soon forgotten.For decades the few critics who remembered her concentrated on the regional aspects of her work. In the Literary History of the United States, where Kate Chopin is highly praised as a local colourist, The Awakening is not even mentioned. In recent years, however, a few critics have given new attention to the novel, emphasising its courageous realism.In the present book, Mr. Seyersted carries out an extensive re-examination of both the life and work of the author, basing it on her total oeuvre. Much new Kate Chopin material, such as previously unknown stories, letters, and a diary, has recently come to light. We can now see that she was a much more ambitious and purposeful writer than we have hitherto known. From the beginning, her special theme was female self-assertion. As each new success increased her self-confidence, she grew more and more daring in her descriptions of emancipated woman who wants to dictate her own life.Mr. Seyersted traces the author's growth as an artist and as a penetrating interpreter of the female condition, and shows how her career culminated in The Awakening and the unknown story 'The Storm.' With these works, which were decades ahead of their time, Kate Chopin takes her place among the important American realist writers of the 1890's.

Crisscrossing the sprawling landscape of Robert Penn Warren, James H. Justus offers us the first comprehensive survey of Warren's complete canon, including the poetry of 1980. The temptation for everyone who has written on Warren, our most distinguished man of letters still active in American literature, asserts Justus, ""is to analyse those themes and moral situations that, because they recur so frequently and obsessively, constitute the massive centrality of an entire corpus."" Justus attempts ""to emphasise the ways by which we become aware of such themes and situations, the technical accomplishment of their rendering, which alone justifies our thinking of Warren as a literary artist."" The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren shows how 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.Dividing his book into four parts, Justus discusses in Part I Warren's cycle of themes, the most enduring of which is self-knowledge, the very source of Warren's life work. He devotes Part II to Warren's poetry: the ""mannered archaism"" of his early work, the increasing mastery of the tendencies practiced by his fellow Agrarians, the metaphysical mode, and the advantage of technique in his most recent poems.Part III concern's Warren's nonfiction prose, with emphasis on Who Speaks for the Negro and I'll Take My Stand. In Part IV, Justus, analyses the novels as political and moral statements in Night Rider, At Heaven's Gate, and All the King's Men; as romance and history in World Enough and Time, Band of Angels, and Wilderness; and as ""art of transparency,"" in The Cave, Flood, Meet Me in the Green Glen, and A Place to Come To. Justus demonstrates Warren's relish for ""crowded densities of actuality"" as fulfilled in the novelist's skill in observing detail. ""No other writer has made so much out of our cultural artifacts. . . . WPA murals, big houses and shotgun bungalows, letters and broadsides.""Warren continues in a southern literary tradition. The values of the country and small town, those affecting attitudes toward social cohesion and Christian assumptions about the nature of man, are often seen in conflict with the values of a life governed by art and the academy. Justus also places Warren's work in the larger context of the various streams of American writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He cites in particular Warren's unresolved relationship to Emerson and compares Warren to Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne.In examining Warren's technical accomplishments, Justus proclaims the novelist/poet to be a man whose distinguished career has surpassed those of Edmund Wilson and Allen Tate. Warren calls himself ""a little footnote"" in the long history of the intellectual tension between transcendentalism and puritanism. Certainly readers of The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren will begin to understand how Warren's discrete works relate to each other, how from poems to novels to prose, early and late ""nothing is lost."" The undertaking by Justus is massive; the accomplishment, monumental.

Until recently most discussions of William Faulkner have centered exclusively on his novels. Yet no chronicle of Faulkner's Growth as a literary artist, perhaps America's foremost in this century, can afford to overlook the years he spent struggling to establish himself as a writer of short stories. To trace in detail Faulkner's personal and artistic growth during the prolific years 1925-1931, when he was approaching artistic ripeness and earning belated recognition, has hitherto been impossible. There seemed to be no means of dating the innumerable drafts, the false starts and fumbling revisions, among the thousands of sheets left behind when he died in 1962.Max Putzel's critical study of these crucial formative years fills this gap, assigning dates to the sketches and drafts of stories and relating them both to Faulkner's jealously guarded private life and the several critical histories of the novels that have recently appeared. Putzel maintains there is a necessary, a ""symbiotic"" relation between the novels and the stories. He also finds that the short story form Faulkner found so hard to master liberated a lyrical power that had been stifled during his confused dilettante period as a poet in a provincial southern town. Yet his turbulent, ambivalent feelings about that town and its inhabitants were essential to his development, however slowly and reluctantly he surrendered to their benign influence, the genius of his homeplace.Faulkner also was sensitive to the monumental revolutionary changes, even the trivial fads and foibles, of his own time, the changes that swept the world outside of Oxford, Mississippi, after the Great War he so regretted having missed. Faulkner's maturing vision of man, history, and class and caste relations was affected by Einstein's theory of relativity, Freud's probing into the hidden wellsprings of human behavior, Eliot's borrowings from anthropology, Joyce's new rhetoric, Diaghilev's eclecticism, Picasso's ventures in cubism and classicism--not to mention the Treaty of Versailles, Prohibition, jazz, free love, free spending, gang violence, false prosperity, the crash, and the depression. These factors also helped shape a style capable of evoking passion and tenderness, anger and laughter, and every intermediate shade of feeling--a style demanding the creative effort of readers. Genius of Place takes all this into account while seeking to determine what is likely to endure and reward future readers of works like ""Carcassonne"" and The Sound and the Fury, the Snopes trilogy and As I Lay Dying, ""Dry September"" and Sanctuary.

In the twenty years of its existence, the second series of the Southern Review continued the editorial orientation of the first series by presenting a range of regional and cosmopolitan works of fiction. This anthology is a collection of twenty-five short stories from the nearly three hundred published in the journal between 1965 and 1985. The editors have sought to illustrate the diversity of subject matter and the tremendous range of tone, voice, and technique that have characterized short fiction in the Southern Review.Although many of the contributors to Selected Stories from the ""Southern Review"" are southern, the collection also includes national and international, new and established writers. The focus of the anthology is on literary merit rather than regional considerations. ""Abroad"" by Nadine Gordimer, which depicts the experiences of a white South African visiting his son in Zimbabwe, is in the collection, along with John William Corrington's ""Pleadings,"" the powerful account of an incident in the life of a south Louisiana attorney. Mary Lavin's ""The Face of Hate"" addresses life amidst the conflict in Northern Ireland, and Elizabeth Spencer's ""The Cousins"" explores the entanglements and coming of age of five young adults on a European vacation. Joyce Carol Oates's ""Détente"" interweaves the personal and political aspects of a Soviet-American literary conference, and Robb Forman Dew follows the adventures of two naive Natchez girls in New Orleans in ""Two Girls Wearing Perfume in the Summer.""From Louis D. Rubin's tentative young newspaperman in ""The St. Anthony Chorale"" to William Mills's sure-footed X-ray technician in ""Sweet Tickfaw Run Softly, Till I End My Song,"" from Rita Dove's compelling ""Secondhand Man"" to John E. Wildeman's Satirical ""Surfiction"", these are characters and stories from the new series of the Southern Review which offer resounding proof that the brilliant publishing tradition originating with Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren has been preserved by a magazine that still maintains its national literary reputation.

On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Florence Mars, a native of Philadelphia, recounts the grim circumstances of the killings and describes what happened to a community confronted by a challenge to long-held beliefs.

Flannery O'Connor believed that fiction must try to achieve something on the order of what St. Gregory wrote about Scripture: every time it presents a fact, it must also disclose a mystery. O'Connor's artistic vision was located squarely in her Catholic faith, yet she realised that to view life only through the eyes of the Church was to ignore a large part of existence. In her fiction, therefore, she explored a wider world, employing voices that challenged conceptions of both self and faith, ultimately enlarging and deepening both. In The Art and Vision of Flannery O'Connor, Robert Brinkmeyer presents an innovative study of O'Connor's fiction by exploring the dialogic forces at work in her writing.Drawing on the insights of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, 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. This pressure and resistance, Brinkmeyer writes, free O'Connor's vision from the limits of its perspective, opening it to growth and understanding. After a thorough discussion of the ways in which O'Connor's Catholic and southern heritage helped to form her artistic vision, Brinkmeyer shows how dialogic encounters are at work in O'Connor's interaction with her largely fundamentalist narrators, the stories they tell, and her readers. He focuses on several of her stories as well as her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. As the first analysis of the dialogical dynamics of O'Connor's art and vision, this study offers an original approach to understanding O'Connor. But the significance of the book extends far beyond O'Connor scholarship, for Brinkmeyer presents a critical method that has value for exploring other writers, particularly other modern Catholic writers.

One of the most enduring characters in Thomas Wolfe's fiction is Francis Starwick, the Midwestern aesthete who befriends Eugene Grant at Harvard in Wolfe's second autobiographical novel, Of Time and the River. Wolfe created Starwick in order to provide a foil for the artistic development of Eugene: Starwick was the pretentious, narrow-minded dilettante whose response to the arts is all talk and pose, as compared with Eugene, who hopes to express in writing his intensity of feeling about all aspects of life.While writing the novel, however, Wolfe found his manuscript proliferating beyond his control, and he turned to his editor at Scribner's Maxwell Perkins, for help in shaping the final version of the book. In the process of organizing the massive manuscript for publication, Perkins deleted some of the analyses of Starwick's behavior and several of the episodes involving Eugene and Starwick. The result was that the relationship between the two young men was not as fully developed as Wolfe had originally planned.Richard S. Kennedy discovered these excised passages among the Wolfe papers at Harvard University's Houghton Library. In The Starwick Episodes has arranged them sequentially and indicated their position in the original manuscript. In one of them Starwick introduces Eugene to Joyce's Ulysses, and in another he takes him to view the paintings in Boston' Museum of Fine Arts. Additional scenes find the two exploring the lower depths of Paris until at length their true sexual natures are revealed in a visit to a Parisian brothel.Kennedy's research also uncovered the story of the life of Kenneth Raisbeck, the young man whom Wolfe used as the starting point for his fictional creation of Starwick. In his Introduction, Kennedy describes Raisbeck's career, both its brilliant promise and its tragic end, and his similarity to the character in the novel.The presence of Starwick in Of Time and the River is unforgettable despite the omission of some important scenes that Wolfe wrote for him. With the publication now of the deleted episodes, readers may gain an enriched sense of Wolfe's fascinating creation and a fuller understanding of what he was trying to convey.

This is an altogether engaging collection of ruminations on early New Orleans writers - George Washington Cable, Grace King, Lafcadio Hearn, and Kate Chopin - as well as three prolific twentieth-century authors who called the Crescent City ""home"" at various times: William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Walker Percy. In the book's final essay, Lewis P. Simpson reflects on the history of New Orleans as a literary center, giving special emphasis to Percy's The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

Daniel Hoffman's bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form.These last three novels of Faulkner's great period are striated with folklore and structured with myths. They teem with folk motifs of comic exaggeration, deception, horse-trading, tall-tale humor. Hitherto, critics unversed in folklore have been able to treat these aspects only in generalities. Here, drawing on fieldwork from the Mississippi Writers Project in the 1930s, the author of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe and the influential Form and Fable in America Fiction demonstrates in detail Faulkner's ironical, subversive, and transformative appropriations of folklore plots, characters, comedy, language, and the style of oral tale-telling, setting these in the full complexity of the works they animate.Hoffman, shows, too how in imagining his dynastic novels, Faulkner interprets myth as history, history as myth. He challenges recent deconstructive, post-Marxist and structuralist readings of ""The Bear,"" and demonstrates the necessity on the reader's part for an historical imagination to complement Faulkner's own.Written with verve, Faulkner's Country Matters enriches our reading of Faulkner by presenting his work in its necessary settings of southern history and culture. Faulkner's modernism is restated as a continuance of the great American fiction tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.

In this indispensable volume, fourteen intellectually compelling essays consider Kate Chopin's life and art from a variety of critical perspectives, biographical, New Historicist, materialist, poststructuralist, feminist, with several of the pieces focusing on Chopin's classic novel, The Awakening."" A worthwhile collection of essays offering usefully eclectic critical perspectives of Chopin and her work."" - Mississippi Quarterly

The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: ""Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community.""Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of coloured People, Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt's most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of ""bright mulatto"" caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage.Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation's moral progress. Andrews argues that ""along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history."" Although Chesnutt's career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America's race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will.William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author's times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt's works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.

The writings of Walker Percy, as Panthea Broughton notes in her introduction, are at once both accessible and inaccessible. Because they tempt readers to identify with characters and recognise ideas, they have gained a large and enthusiastic following. But because they are subtle and complicated, they defy attempts to reduce them to transparencies. Indeed, Percy's fiction and nonfiction have a curious, baffling quality that eludes all but the most scrupulously thoughtful and sensitive readers. Through his close alignment with European novelists and philosophers, this native of Alabama has given to American fiction a classic tone that is lacking in the work of such twentieth-century writers as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.In The Art of Walker Percy Broughton has brought together essays from fifteen scholars. Writing from a conviction of the centrality and worth of Walker Percy's work, as well as from the idea that fresh criticism is of value not only to readers but to living authors as well, the essayists present diverse approaches to understanding his art.Cleanth Brooks, in his essay, compares Percy with Eric Voegelin and notes the similarity of their respective approaches to the moral problems of modern man. Martin Luschei, in an examination of the technique of The Moviegoer, shows how Percy presents his fictional world through the use of filmic art. William Poteat's critique of The Message in the Bottle deals with Percy's original contribution to the philosophy of language. Ted Spivey offers a structuralist analysis of Percy's work and suggests that in Lancelot Percy's quest takes a new direction.Still other contributors approach Percy through more traditional rubrics, such as the South, Kierkegaard's stages, dualism, and theology, in new and revelatory ways. Written specifically for this new collection, their essays present the reader with a sense of how many appropriate ""stratagems"" there are for seeing the meaning in Percy. As they bring his work into focus, therefore, they assist Walker Percy in his avowed strategy of helping us see the world.

Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. A noted poet, Ransom chose to devote his energies primarily to the composition of prose. A southern agrarian in the 1930s, he later rejected the movement as nostalgic and unrealistic. But perhaps more central to his development as a man of letters, he came to renounce all traditional religious beliefs, even though he was descended from a line of Methodist ministers.In John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith Keiran Quinlan examines these and other incongruities within the context of the writer's career and offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject. Quinlan argues that the key to understanding Ransom's development lies in ""his early rejection of the tenets of Christian theology and in his consequent effort at articulating an alternative philosophy to live by."" Ransom's literary efforts are viewed as a philosophical project aimed at discovering an empirical validity for the world rather than a transcendental one.Quinlan examines Ransom's development against the background of the literary and philosophic movements that influenced the writer. He shows how thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Dewey, and the logical positivists, and poets like Arnold, Hardy, Stevens, Eliot, and Graves, all made significant contributions to Ransom's progress.Although Ransom has often been allied with T.S. Eliot, who turned to religion and a transcendental knowledge of the world, Quinlan contends that Ransom's real sympathies were with Wallace Stevens, who south a suitable substitute for religious faith in the celebration of a world he felt was emptied of its transcendental component.Ransom's difficulties are in many ways symptomatic of the struggles of our age, the supplanting of God and a supernatural world view by scientific advances, the loss of faith, and thus the need to find an alternative meaning in existence. Quinlan stresses that although the gradual emergence of Ransom's ""secular faith"" was a direct result of his lifelong dialogue with the Christian tradition, his final belief was that ""'this is the best of all possible worlds'; inasmuch as it is not possible for imagination to acquaint is with any other world."" Quinlan concludes, therefore, that Ransom belongs squarely in the American pragmatist tradition.

To her self-posed questions ""What is a woman's narrative?"" and ""Why Warren?"" Lucy Ferriss responds with an acutely perceptive examination that is groundbreaking in two regards. Sleeping with the Boss opens up the feminist critical project by showing that author gender has no bearing on the creation of feminine-structured narrative. Moreover, by exposing a considerable ""female consciousness"" in the major fictional works of Robert Penn Warren, it departs dramatically from previous criticism of Warren.Ferriss, a novelist as well as a critic, expands on narrative poetics to suggest that female subjectivity is the central concept in defining a woman's narrative. Specifically, the subjective voice of a female character is present to such a degree that the traditional structures of masculine narrative (described as linear, forward moving, and authoritative) can no longer hold. Leapfrogging over existing feminist theory, she asserts that such female consciousness may permeate the writing of men as well as women.Within Warren's traditional masculine narrative style, Ferriss detects the complicating presence of female voice, with its potential to alter the focus and direction of the plot. As she demonstrates, the degree to which Warren distances himself from or steps inside his female characters' consciousness varies enormously across his career. Still, his novels reveal the consistent pattern of a major woman character in a liaison with a wealthy or powerful man; those sexual relationships, Ferriss maintains, are pivotal in establishing female personae whose subjective effect on the narrative disturbs or overturns conventional readings of the novels' meaning. For example, she presents a startlingly subversive analysis of the character Amantha Starr (Band of Angels), heretofore viewed as a simpering victim by critics. In addition to nine of Warren's novels, Ferriss critiques his book-length poem, Brother to Dragons, which in the powerful voice of Lucy Lewis exhibits the moral and narrative limitations of the male speakers even as that female voice is itself thwarted and cut off. She also explores Warren's frequent motif of the female empty-handed gesture, reading in it the author's own assumption of the feminine perspective by expressing his abdication of narrative authority and ambivalence toward ascribing meaning.Sleeping with the Boss represents a new generation of Warren scholarship, revitalizing the poet-novelist's complex oeuvre in light of contemporary concerns. It provokes a radical rethinking of some of the plot elements taken for granted by other critics of Warren's work and offers a wide range of new ways to encounter his female characters.

The New Orleans writer Grace King was an intensely loyal daughter of the South. Fostered by bitter memories of the Civil War, her loyalty was kept burning by her family's struggle to regain its wealth and maintain its social position during the long agony of Reconstruction.In Grace King: A Southern Destiny, Robert Bush tells of King's life and her art, both of which she enthusiastically dedicated to the memory and welfare of her region, her city, and her family. When she began writing in 1886, it was out of a sense of anger at what she saw as George Washington Cable's disloyalty to the South, his deliberately false portrayal of New Orleans' Creoles and blacks. King was herself a conservative in racial matters, and a number of her stories celebrate the loyalty that she has observed freed slaves showing their former masters.But Grace King was far from conservative in her determination to earn money as a writer and to master the ideas of her era, neither endeavor considered a particularly appropriate ambition for a patrician woman of her time. She was proud to be able to contribute to her family's income, and she developed a sharp eye for the fluctuations in the literary marketplace. In the late 1880s King worked in the local-colour genre that was then in vogue. When the demand for that school of regional writing declined in the 1890s, she turned to the shorter ""balcony stories"" in which the details of local background were minimized. Then later in the decade, she focused her talents on writing Louisiana history after she found that publishers wanted the kind of sound, colourful work she was capable of producing.Grace King's major accomplishments in fiction are a small number of first-rate stories and a quiet, realistic novel about New Orleans during Reconstruction, The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard. Her best historical work is New Orleans, the Place and the People. However the significance and fascination of her life lies not just in the pages of the books she wrote but also in her role as a literary champion of the South, carrying her determined views from New Orleans to New York, New England, Canada, England, and France.

In 1920 Thomas Wolfe left the South with the strong desire to become a dramatist. To pursue his chosen craft, he enrolled in the Harvard 47 Workshop, at that time the most renowned in the nation. At first he wrote plays about Appalachian society and the Civil War. But it was not until Wolfe turned to the modern South, inspired by a disturbing return to his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, that his genius awoke. There he found the material he would work into the best of his three full-length plays written at Harvard, the material that in the next decade would be recast into the novels that would make him famous. This is the first book publication of Welcome to Our City, Thomas Wolfe's play in ten scenes of a modern South ruled by liars and real estate agents, overrun with boosterism, and dedicated to greed. This sprawling, fiery work has lain dormant among Wolfe's papers for over fifty years, abandoned by its author after an unsuccessful attempt to revise and shorten it for a New York Theatre Guild production. For this edition, Richard S. Kennedy has reassembled a full performance text of the workshop version presented at Harvard in 1923, a production that involved forty-five cast members, including over thirty speaking parts, required seven stage changes, and lasted over three and a half hours in performance.The action of Welcome to Our City centers on a scheme of the town fathers and real estate promoters of Altamont, a small southern city, to snatch up all the property in a centrally located black district, evict the tenants, tear down their houses and shops, and build a new white residential section in its place. When the blacks, under the angry leadership of a strong-willed doctor, resist eviction, a race riot breaks out, shattering both the precarious social balance of the city and the ""progressive"" dreams of Altamont's boosters. Building on this plot, Wolfe guides his audience through the back rooms, stately homes, ans shanty towns of Altamont, contrasting tradition-bound southern characters with a new breed of life drawn from the vast menagerie of 1920s Main Street America: fact-spouting yes-men, hypocritical religious leaders, anti-intellectual professors, provincial country club matrons, and politicians inauthentic from their heads to their feet.Welcome to Our City is not merely an exhibit in the artistic development of a future novelist. Wolfe used the dramatic form inventively and with considerable inspiration to expose the culture of greed that he saw spreading around him and to caricature the men who, he feared, would usher in an age of mediocrity across America. Emotionally gripping and mockingly satiric, Welcome to Our City captures the festering social climate of the 1920s in a vision of life that is uncomfortably relevant to our own times.

In Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest's Fictional Road to Rebellion, Ritchie Devon Watson, Jr., examines the emergence of the planter-aristocrat over the yeoman as the dominant cultural icon in the newly settled states of the Old Southwest - Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas - during the first half of the nineteenth century. He related this region's shift in cultural ideals, as reflected in its literature, both to the coming of the Civil War and the failure of the postbellum South to reintegrate itself fully into the nation.In the early 1800s Thomas Jefferson's stalwart yeoman farmer was the mythic figure that gave the most dynamic expression to and most compelling justification for expansion to the west. This potent symbol of rural democracy was enthusiastically embraced by settlers in both midwestern and southern territories. By 1830, however, residents of the new southern states had initiated a profound imaginative movement away from the frontier myths that had linked them with midwesterners. Faced with increasingly hostile attacks on slavery and the plantation system, southerners from Virginia to Louisiana united in defense of the plantation South. Watson shows how writers of the Old Southwest reflected this cultural shift in their tendency to idealize the planter and to subvert, subordinate, or ignore the yeoman. Joining cultural and intellectual forces with the more established plantation societies of the Eastern Seaboard, these writers turned toward the Cavalier - the noble, cultured planter of aristocratic blood and manners who, like a father, presided with wisdom and love over a large plantation - as the primary representative of the southern way of life.Watson builds his argument by analysing many different kinds of writing. Choosing texts that shed light on the newly evolving culture of the Old Southwest, Watson discusses the novelists William Garrott Brown, James Lane Allen, Joseph Holt Ingraham, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Augusta Jane Evans, historian Charles Gayarre, humorists Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, New South propagandist Henry Grady, novelist and story writer George Washington Cable, and poets Joseph Brennan and Sidney Lanier.The Cavalier ideal, Watson explains, unified the states of the Confederacy and served as a kind if icon to be carried into battle. After the war the figure was resurrected by southern writers and made an integral part of the region's Lost Cause myth, which northerners helped perpetuate. The Cavalier figure has continued to lead a vigorous life into the present century, as attested by novels such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, and even William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!Yeoman Versus Cavalier is a solid and entertainingly written analysis of how the Cavalier, as the South's unifying mythical figure, helped shape southern history and the creation of the legend of the Old South following the Civil War. It contributes greatly to our understanding of the antebellum South and demonstrates how studying a work of literature can lead to a fuller comprehension of the culture that produced it.

William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) was the preeminent southern man of letters in the antebellum period, a prolific, talented writer in many genres and an eloquent intellectual spokesman of r his region. During his long career, he wrote plays, poetry, literary criticism, biography and history; but he is best remembered for his numerous novels and tales. Many Ann Wimsatt provides the first significant full-length evaluation of Simms's achievement in his long fiction, selected poetry, essays, and short fiction.Wimsatt's chief emphasis is on the thirty-odd novels that Simms published from the mid-1830s until after the Civil War. In bringing his impressive body of work to life, she makes use of biographical and historical information and also of twentieth-century literary theories of the romance, Simm's principal genre. Through analyses of such seminal works as Guy Rivers, The Yemassee, The Cassique of Kiawah, and Woodcraft, Wimsatt illuminates Simm's contributions to the romance tradition, contributions misunderstood by previous critics, and suggests how to view his novels within the light of recent literary criticism. She also demonstrates how Simms used the historical conditions of southern culture as well as events of his own life to flesh out literary patterns, and she analyses his use of low-country, frontier and mountain settings.Although critics praised Simms early in his career as ""the first American novelist of the day,"" the panic of 1837 and the changes in the book market that it helped foster severely damaged his prospects for wealth and fame. The financial recession, Wimsatt finds, together with shifts in literary taste, contributed to the decline of Simms's reputation. Simms attempted to adjust to the changing climate for fiction by incorporating two modes of nineteenth-century realism, the satiric portrayal of southern manners and southern backwoods humor, into the framework of his long romances; but his accomplishments in these areas have been undervalued or misunderstood by critics since is time.Wimsatt's book is the first to survey Simms's fiction and much of his other writing against the background of his life and literary career and the first to make extensive use of his immense correspondence. It is an important study of a neglected author who once served as the leafing symbol of literary activity in the South. It fills what has heretofore been a serious gap in southern literary studies.

In this succinct study, Scott Romine considers a key paradox that has been associated with the concept of ""community"" from the beginning of modern southern literary criticism: namely, that communities often valued for their cohesiveness and moral stability were at the same time sites of oppression along race and class lines. How were communities so deeply divided able to maintain even the appearance of organic cohesiveness? The Narrative Forms of Southern Community contains close readings of five narratives, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn, Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia, William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, and William Faulkner's Light in August, that attempt to mediate or negotiate the social tensions inherent in the stratified world they represent.Whereas most earlier examinations of community are thematically oriented, this study focuses on the formal structures, framing techniques, narrative stylistics, master codes, and collective plots, among others, that allow the narrative in question to recover an image of an ideal social order. In particular, this book traces the narrative strategies of deferral, displacement, and evasion that enable what can be thought of as ""simulated consensus,"" a paradox that informs all of the works under discussion. Romine, in arguing against the idea of community as a group of like-minded individuals, suggests that community is better conceived as a social group that, lacking a commonly held view of reality, connects by means of norms, codes, and manners that produce an artificial, or at least symbolically constituted, social reality.Romine realises the complexity of the concept of community and appreciates the challenges facing those who wrestle with its questions. By exploring the various ways in which writers associated with the cultural status quo attempt to rationalize the oppressive nature of society, this first book-length study of community in southern literature contributes greatly to current revisionary reappraisals by going beyond many of the old assumptions.

Ernest J. Gaines, the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men, was born in 1933 in the small south Louisiana town of Oscar. In his childhood the center of his world was the old slave quarters on the River Lake Plantation, where five generations of his family lived. All of Gaines's books have been set in this general area of Louisiana, and though none of his work is strictly autobiographical, his writing bears the distinctive stamp of the rural folk culture amid which he was raised. Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton's Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines is a collection of interviews conducted on the porch of Gaines's home in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.Gaines talks about a variety of topics, including the influence of other writers, among them Faulkner, Hemingway, and Mark Twain, on his style and the importance of oral tradition and folk culture to his writing. He discusses the major themes of his work, such as survival with dignity and the search for manhood, and he describes the relationships among the black, Creole, and Cajun communities of south Louisiana and how they have been portrayed in his fiction. Gaines also comments on the craft of writing, his role as a teacher, the film versions of some of his books, his relationships with his agent and editors, and his work in progress.This is the first book-length work on Gaines to be published. It will be of importance to scholars and students of American literature, particularly southern and Afro-American literature, because it gives the reader valuable insights into Gaines's life and writing. The format and conversational tone of the book will also appeal to the audience drawn to Gaines's fiction.

This close study of the first six novels of Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz, situates her as an African American writer within the American literary tradition who interrogates national identity and reconstructs social memory. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle portrays Nobel laureate Morrison as a historiographer attempting to bridge the gap between emergent black middle-class America and its subaltern origins.Gurleen Grewal demonstrates how Morrison's novels perform a therapeutic and political function of recovery. What is most compelling about Morrison's fiction, Grewal posits, is its reevaluation of the individual via the complex sociopolitical heritage that bespeaks the individual. Ultimately, these fictive ""circles of sorrow"" invite the reader into the collective struggle of humankind who are living the long sentence of history by repeating, contesting, and remaking it.

For two weeks every year, literary figures from throughout the country gather in rural Sewanee, Tennessee, to lead the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a series of workshops and colloquia aimed at cultivating the craft of writing. Gleaned from the first ten conferences, the ""craft"" lectures collected inDisclosing Craft offer a range of perspectives on writing as practiced by various playwrights, poets, and fiction writers whose gifts have made the Sewanee conference a mecca for developing talent.The essays offer a banquet of topics that will whet the appetite of all authors, professional and amateur. Russell Banks ponders the role of research in the constitutive power of the imagination, John Casey considers simultaneity in art, and Ellen Douglas describes how a writer confronts the changing shape of memory.Reviewing the many changes he has witnessed in his distinguished career as a playwright, Horton Foote offers his perspective on the collaborative spirit of the theater, and Ernest Gaines explains why his subject matter must always remain the people of Louisiana. Anthony Hecht responds to W. H. Auden, revealing the ways both poets pair talent with subject, and in a discussion of Robert Frost, John Hollander explores the delicate subtleties of Frost's figurative thought.Diane Johnson offers a witty and frank answer to the question all writers face at one time or another: ""Write what?"" Donald Justice expounds on the virtues of obscurity in poetry, and Romulus Linney offers practical guidelines for using dramatic action to revise a play. In her examination of Nabokov's Bend Sinister, Alice McDermott demonstrates that fiction writers are bound by no rules other than ""do whatever you can get away with."" Marsha Norman provides a witty list of the dos and don'ts of playwriting and Francine Prose stresses the importance of detail to a story's credibility. Finally, volume editor Wyatt Prunty discusses the figure of vacancy in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Peter Taylor.

Robert Kirschten maintains that most formal analyses of Jams Dickey's poetry have been unsatisfactory or at best only partially complete. Some critics have labeled Dickey an American romantic, while others have called him a mystic, a pantheist, a comic poet.In James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth, Kirschten provides a fuller understanding of Dickey's lyric vision by employing what Ronald Crane calls ""multiple working hypotheses."" The first three of these, mysticism, neoplatonism, and romanticism, serve primarily to align general traits in Dickey's poetry with familiar literary traditions. The fourth of Kirschten's hypotheses, primitivism, is drawn from the field of anthropology. Kirschten shows that such anthropological concepts as magic, rites of passage, and ritual violence are vital in describing Dickey's central methods.After synthesizing the four hypotheses to establish a critical base, Kirschten investigates three crucial elements in Dickey's poetry: his lyric speakers, central narrative devices, and poetic diction. The final chapter, in a culmination of the entire investigation, offers a reading of the long poem ""The Shark's Parlor.""Kirschten's study reveals a sure grasp of the philosophical principles of literary criticism as well as a wide range of reading, especially in the literature of romanticism. This lucid examination gives us genuine new insights into the work of one of the country's premier poets.

In Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929-1938, Aldo P. Magi and Richard Walser have brought together twenty-five accounts of Thomas Wolfe talking to the press, ranging from the first interview he gave, a conversation with a student journalist for New York University's Daily News, to the last, an interview with the Portland Sunday Oregonian in July 1938, only a few months before his death.These encounters with the working press have an appealing intimacy rarely found in biographies or scholarly studies. Wolfe, always happy to meet with journalists, was ever ready to talk about the writing of Look Homeward, Angel, about Scribner's acceptance of the manuscript, and about the book's popular reception. ""As my book began to grow before me, a wild sense of exultation and joyous elation seized me,"" he told an interviewer for the Rocky Mountain News. Walking along New York's Fifth Avenue with another interviewer just after Look Homeward, Angel's appearance, Wolfe spotted a copy prominently displayed in a bookstore window and proudly pointed it out. ""His eyes came away from the window unwillingly,"" the reporter noted. Nor did Wolfe shy away from addressing the outrage his first novel occasioned in his hometown. ""If they think I have intended to case reflections on my old home and my own people they have gone far wrong,"" he told an interviewer for the Asheville Times.Wolfe talked about his southern upbringing, his education, his frequent trips to Europe, and his life in New York. He enjoyed discussing his favourite authors and books, as well as what he himself planned to write in the future. Wolfe had tremendous faith in America's ability to produce a great national literature.Headnotes and afterwords place each interview in perspective, heightening the reader's grasp of the varied situations in which Wolfe met with reporters. In some instances, the interviewers themselves reflect on their meetings with Wolfe. For these interviews the journalists had no tape recorders and did not conduct the sort of length, in-depth interviews that have now become common. The interviews are, instead, often the products of several hours of questioning, put together from jotted down notes and from the reporters' memories. Since most of these interviews have been buried in newspaper archives for decades, even veteran Wolfe scholars will find much here that is fresh and useful.

At a time when sectional conflicts were dividing the nation, the five best-selling southern domestic novelists vigorously came to the defense of their native region. In response to northern criticism, Caroline Gilman, Caroline Hentz, Maria McIntosh, Mary Virginia Terhune, and Augusta Jane Evans presented through their fiction what they believed to be the ""true"" South. From the mid-1830s through 1866, these five novelists wrote about an ordered South governed by the aristocratic ethic of noblesse oblige, and argued that slavery was part of a larger system of reciprocal relationships that made southern society the moral superior of the individualistic North.Scholars have typically approached the domestic novel as a national rather than a regional phenomenon, assuming that because practically all domestic fiction was written by and for women, the elements of all domestic novels are essentially identical. Elizabeth Moss corrects that simplification, locating Gilman Hentz, McIntosh, Terhune, and Evans within the broader context of antebellum social and political culture and establishing their lives and works as important sources of information concerning the attitudes of southerners, particularly southern women, toward power and authority within their society. Moss's study of the novels of these women challenges the ""transhistorical view"" of women's history and integrates women into the larger context of antebellum southern history.Domestic Novelists in the Old South shows that whereas northern readers and writers of domestic fiction may have been interested in changing their society, their southern counterparts were concerned with strengthening and sustaining the South's existing social structure. But the southern domestic novelists did more than reiterate the ideology of the ruling class; they also developed a compelling defense of slavery in terms of southern culture that reflected their perceptions of southern society and women's place within it. Just how strong an impact these books had cannot be precisely determined, but Moss argues that at the height of their popularity, the five novelists were able to reach a broader audience than male apologists.In spite of their literary and historical significance, Caroline Gilman, Caroline Hentz, Maria McIntosh, Mary Virginia Tehune, and Augusta Jane Evans have received scant scholarly attention. Moss shows that the lives and works of these five women illuminate the important role domestic novelists played in the ideological warfare of the day. Writing in the language of domesticity, they appealed to the women of America, using the images of home and hearth to make a persuasive case for antebellum southern culture.

It seems appropriate, if not inevitable, that one of our best critics should be the foremost authority on one of our best novelists. Cleanth Brooks, the author of three seminal studies of William Faulkner, has been a serious student of that master craftsman's fiction for more than four decades. In this new collection, Brooks considers many of the important characteristics of Faulkner's work. He focuses more specifically than he has in the past on certain questions and in some instances offers rebuttals to what he considered unfair assessments of Faulkner. In the first essay, Brooks challenges the notion that Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and other members of the Fugitive-Agrarian movement at Vanderbilt University were slow to recognise Faulkner's achievements. Indeed, Brooks provides clear evidence not only that the Fugitives were early supporters of Faulkner but that Faulkner and the Fugitives shared many concerns and ideas about their region. Brooks also writes about Faulkner's personal beliefs and demonstrates how the virtues Faulkner held in highest esteem - such as courage and honor - are embodied in his fiction. In two essays, ""Faulkner and the Community"" and ""Faulkner's Two Cities,"" Brooks analyses the importance of a closely knit world - specifically the hill region of north Mississippi and the cities of Memphis and New Orleans - to Faulkner's works.Brooks considers Faulkner's serious regard for the chivalric tradition, as well as his amusement in Gavin Stevens' exemplification of it in Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Faulkner's treatment of women characters, especially in Light in August and The Hamlet, is discussed, as are his ideas about the American Dream.These essays are vintage Brooks. The prose is, as always, felicitous, the manner modest and winning, the thought pertinent and rigorous. Despite the thematic diversity of the essays, the emphasis is ultimately the same: reading and rereading the novels of William Faulkner is a continuing pleasure and an enduring challenge.

Splendid. . . . McAlexander's biography only makes it clearer than ever that Peter Taylor was our last great southern man of letters."" - Chicago Tribune""For those of us to whom Taylor's writing is among the chief glories of 20th-century American literature, Peter Taylor: A Writer's Life has much to tell us about how he emerged from what he called 'the small old world we knew...in Tennessee' and explored that world with such acuity, clarity, and unsentimental love."" - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World""McAlexander has done a splendid job of tracing the progression of Taylor's writing through the circumstances of a surprisingly frenetic life...Anyone interested in the evolution of fiction writing in the last century will be delighted to come upon this volume...fascinating, sometimes amusing, and often heartbreaking."" - New York Times Book ReviewHubert H. 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. McAlexander knits together the facts of Taylor's life in a compelling, seamless account: his deep and distinguished family roots in Tennessee; his close bonds with writers from three generations, including Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and James Alan McPherson; his establishment of the dysfunctional family as a force in American literature; and his perseverance as a writer, finally rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize at age seventy. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, Peter Taylor presents a vivid picture of the man, the artist, and his literary milieu.

Jews have long occupied visible roles in the South. Jewish families have owned establishments ranging from dry-goods stores to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and some of the region's most important writers and scholars have been Jewish. Yet surveys of southern culture rarely assess the contributions of Jews, while histories of Jews in America virtually exclude those living in the South. Eliza R. L. McGraw's multifaceted study fills both gaps and in doing so expands how we define the South.In Two Covenants, McGraw mines eclectic representations of Southern Jewishness as varied as the Carolina Israelite newspaper, the Mardi Gras Krewe du Jieux, southern Baptist conversion-instruction pamphlets, and the film Driving Miss Daisy. She also considers literary representations of southern Jews in the works of both Jewish and non-Jewish writers, including Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Lillian Hellman, David Cohn, Louis Rubin, Jr., Eli Evans, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, and Charles Chesnutt.While concerned with established concepts such as ethnicity and region, McGraw raises many questions that illustrate the complexity of southern Jewishness. Can one individual straddle two identities? How do race, class, and gender influence southern Jewishness? What are the differences between southern Jews and other southerners, or between southern Jews and other Jews? Does anti-Semitism manifest itself differently or with unique effects in the South?In suggesting answers to these and other questions, McGraw ranges widely over the southern cultural landscape and reveals that although southern Jewishness remains a marginal identity due to the small size of its constituency it nevertheless inhabits and helps to form the South at large. The very presence and vitality of southern Jewishness demonstrate that southern identity, like national identity, is a fluid cultural experience.