Books in the Southern Literary Studies series

Until recently most discussions of William Faulkner have centred exclusively on his novels. Yet no chronicle of Faulkner's Growth as a literary artist can afford to overlook the years he spent struggling to establish himself as a writer of short stories. Max Putzel provides a critical study of these crucial formative years.

Explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system.

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 analyzing 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.

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.

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 Colored 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.

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.

Robert Kirschten maintains that most formal analyses of Jams Dickey's poetry have been unsatisfactory or at best only partially complete. 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".

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. In John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith, Keiran Quinlan offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject.

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.

Examines a wide array of African American novels written during the last half of the twentieth century, demonstrating that religious vision not only informs black literature but also serves as a foundation for black culture generally.

The horrific 1955 slaying of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till marks a significant turning point in the history of American race relations. The eleven essays in this volume examine how the narrative of the Till lynching continues to haunt racial consciousness and to resonate in our collective imagination.

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. In this volume, Robert Bush discusses King's life and her art.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 this volume, Elizabeth Moss locates these novelists within the broader context of antebellum social and political culture.

Examines the paradox that communities famous for their cohesiveness and moral stability were in fact oppressive along race and class lines. The author uses readings from "Georgia Scenes", "Swallow Barn", "In Ole Virginia", "Lanterns on the Levee" and "Light in August" to illustrate this point.

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.

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. This volume provides an extensive re-examination of both the life and work of Kate Chopin, basing it on her total oeuvre.