Books in the Southern Literary Studies series

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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".

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.