Books in the Southern Literary Studies series

In Ruin and Resilience, Daniel Spoth confronts why the environmental stories told about the U.S. South curve inevitably toward distressing plotlines. Examining more than a dozen works of postbellum literature and cinema, Spoth's analysis winds from John Muir's walking journey across the war-torn South, through the troubling of southern environmentalism's modernity by Faulkner and Hurston, past the accounts of its acceleration in Welty and O'Connor, and finally into the present, uncovering how the tragic econarrative is transformed by contemporary food studies, climate fiction, and speculative tales inspired by the region. Phrased as a reaction to the rising temperatures and swelling sea levels in the South, Ruin and Resilience conceptualizes an environmental, ecocritical ethos for the southern United States that takes account of its fundamentally vulnerable status and navigates the space between its reactionary politics and its ecological failures.

"Focusing on the crucial period of 1820 to 1860, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster examines the strong economic bonds between the antebellum plantation South and the burgeoning city of New York that resulted from the highly lucrative trade in cotton. In this richly detailed work of literary and cultural history, Ritchie Devon Watson Jr. charts how the partnership brought fantastic wealth to both the South and Gotham during the first half of the nineteenth century. That mutually beneficial alliance also cemented New York's reputation as the northern metropolis most supportive of and hospitable to southerners. Both parties initially found the commercial and cultural entente advantageous, but their collaboration grew increasingly fraught by the 1840s as rising abolitionist sentiment in the North decried the system of chattel slavery that made possible the mass production of cotton. In an effort to stem the swelling tide of abolitionism, conservative southerners demanded absolute political fealty to their peculiar institution from the city that had profited most from the cotton trade. By 1861, reactionary circles in the South viewed New York's failure to extend such unalloyed validation as the betrayal of an erstwhile ally that in the words of one polemicist deemed Gotham worthy of being "blotted from the list of cities." Drawing on contemporary letters, diaries, fiction, and travel writings, Grand Emporium, Mercantile Monster provides the first detailed study of the complicated relationship between the antebellum South and New York City in the decades leading up to the Civil War"--

When Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina savagely caned Senator Charles Sumner Massachusetts on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 1856, southerners viewed the attack as a triumphant affirmation of southern chivalry, northerners as a confirmation of southern barbarity. Public opinion was similarly divided nearly three-and-a-half years later after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, with northerners crowning John Brown as a martyr to the cause of freedom as southerners excoriated him as a consciousness fanatic. These events opened American minds to the possibility that North and South might be incompatible societies, but some of Dixie's defenders were willing to go one step further--to propose that northerners and southerners represented not just a "divided people" but two scientifically distinct races. In Normans and Saxons, Ritchie Watson, Jr., explores the complex racial mythology created by the upper classes of the antebellum South in the wake of these divisive events to justify secession and, eventually, the Civil War. This mythology cast southerners as descendants of the Normans of eleventh-century England and thus also of the Cavaliers of the seventeenth century, some of whom had come to the New World and populated the southern colonies. These Normans were opposed, in mythic terms, by Saxons--Englishmen of German descent--some of whose descendants made up the Puritans who settled New England and later fanned out to populate the rest of the North. The myth drew on nineteenth-century science and other sources to portray these as two separate, warring "races," the aristocratic and dashing Normans versus the common and venal Saxons. According to Watson, southern polemical writers employed this racial mythology as a justification of slavery, countering the northern argument that the South's peculiar institution had combined with its Norman racial composition to produce an arrogant and brutal land of oligarchs with a second-rate culture. Watson finds evidence for this argument in both prose and poetry, from the literary influence of Sir Walter Scott, De Bow's Review, and other antebellum southern magazines, to fiction by George Tucker, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Alexander Caruthers and northern and southern poetry during the Civil War, especially in the works of Walt Whitman. Watson also traces the continuing impact of the Norman versus Saxon myth in "Lost Cause" thought and how the myth has affected ideas about southern sectionalism of today. Normans and Saxons provides a thorough analysis of the ways in which myth ultimately helped to convince Americans that regional differences over the issue of slavery were manifestations of deeper and more profound differences in racial temperament--differences that made civil war inevitable.

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.

Demonstrates that structures of media undergird American regionalism through the representation of a given geography's peoples, places, and ideologies. THe book also outlines how the region answers back to the national media by circulating ever-shifting ideas of place via new platforms.

Demonstrates that structures of media undergird American regionalism through the representation of a given geography's peoples, places, and ideologies. THe book also outlines how the region answers back to the national media by circulating ever-shifting ideas of place via new platforms.

Drawing from recent debates about the validity of regional studies and scepticism surrounding the efficacy of the concept of authenticity, Clare Chadd's Postregional Fictions focuses on questions of southern regional authenticity in fiction published by Barry Hannah from 1972 to 2001.

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.

A panorama of past and contemporary southern society are captured in Bridging Southern Cultures by some of the South's leading historians, anthropologists, literary critics, musicologists, and folklorists. This exciting collection reaches aspects of southern heritage that previous approaches have long obscured.

New Yorker James Baldwin once declared that a black man can look at a map of the United States, contemplate the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and thus scare himself to death. In The Scary Mason-Dixon Line, Trudier Harris explores why black writers have consistently both loved and hated the South.

In this unique work, twelve prominent Kate Chopin scholars reflect on their parts in the Kate Chopin revival and its impact on their careers. A generation ago, against powerful odds, many of them staked their reputations on the belief - now fully validated - that Chopin is one of America's essential writers.

In this groundbreaking study, Gary Ciuba examines how four of the American South's most probing writers of twentieth-century fiction - Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and Walker Percy - expose the roots of violence in southern culture.

In the most extensive work to date on major poets from the mountain South, John Lang takes as his point of departure an oft-quoted remark by Jim Wayne Miller: "Appalachian literature is - and has always been - as decidedly worldly, secular, and profane in its outlook as the [region's] traditional religion appears to be spiritual and otherworldly."

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.

In this first interdisciplinary study of all nine of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber investigates how the communal and personal trauma of slavery embedded in the bodies and minds of its victims lives on through successive generations of African Americans.

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.

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.

For two weeks every year, literary figures from across America gather in 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, this collection offers a range of perspectives on writing as practiced by various writers.

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.

Presents the history of the twentieth-century American novel as a continuous narrative dialogue between white and black voices. Shelly Brivic traces how four of the most renowned works written between 1930 and 1990 progress through the interaction of white and black perspectives toward confronting the calamity of slavery and its continuing legacy.

Argues that writers like Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the Mississippi River Valley.

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.

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.

Magi and Walser bring 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.

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".

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.

William Gilmore Simms was the preeminent southern man of letters in the antebellum period, a prolific, talented writer in many genres and an eloquent intellectual spokesman of his region. Many Ann Wimsatt provides the first significant full-length evaluation of Simms's achievement in his long fiction, selected poetry, essays, and short fiction.

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.