In the following excerpt, Gray concentrates on developments in the literature of the New South from the romance and nostalgia of early writers, to the cultural expressions of Sidney Lanier's poetry and the autobiographical satire of Mark Twain.
In the following essay, Yaeger discusses Southern women writers' frequent use of physically grotesque characters in their works and emphasizes the latter's political role in “mapping an entire region's social and psychic neuroses.”
In the following essay, Long contends that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1868 novel The Gates Ajar offers an early symbolic analysis of “the inadequacy of traditional belief systems” in the post-Civil War era.
In the following essay, Long contends that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1868 novel The Gates Ajar offers an early symbolic analysis of “the inadequacy of traditional belief systems” in the post-Civil War era.
In the following excerpt, Tracey examines the “double-proposal” novels of Caroline Lee Hentz as works that critique the position of privileged women in antebellum society while reinforcing the overall values of the Old South.
In the following essay, Spivey presents an overview of the role of the city in Southern life and the Southern literary imagination, noting that the South has traditionally—and mistakenly—been regarded as an agricultural society.
In the following essay, Stephens probes the literary precursors of George Washington Cable's novel The Grandissimes and discusses the work as the first fully-realized family saga in Southern literature.
In the following essay, Gwin suggests thematic affinities between Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mary H. Eastman's pro-slavery response Aunt Phillis's Cabin, especially in terms of the feminist subtext in both novels—Southern women as a whole standing against the dominant male power structure.
In the following essay, Osthaus documents the career of William Tappan Thompson, an influential writer and Savannah journalist who voiced the opinions of conservative, white supremacist, and non-appeasement Southerners throughout the Reconstruction era.
In the following essay, Ridgely presents an overview of Southern literature between 1879 and 1899, emphasizing major figures and works in the era of local color.
In the following essay, Buchanan presents an overview of Lee Smith's career, praising her talent as a natural storyteller, her flexibility in handling point of view, and her mixing of the comic and the tragic in her works.
In the following essay, Yarborough contends that Frederick Douglass's reinterpretation and exaltation of a slave rebellion in his novella The Heroic Slave is subverted by the underlying prejudices of the white, masculine worldview.
In the following essay, Gebhard enumerates culturally subversive qualities in otherwise sentimental representations of white Southern gentlemen in the literature of the New South.
In the following excerpt, Ridgely observes myth-making qualities in the novels of the Old South—romantic works that elaborate themes of Southern uniqueness, manifest destiny, and separatism.
In the following excerpt, Gray studies the antebellum novels of William Gilmore Simms and his contemporaries as they valorize the South while occasionally depicting the region as slowly but continuously disintegrating.
In the following essay, Gabbin focuses on the literary career of Sonia Sanchez, stressing her blending of political and personal, urban and rural elements in her works.
In the following essay, Page discusses the paucity of a truly Southern literature prior to the Civil War and summarizes the principal Southern novelists, short story writers, and poets of the antebellum period.
In the following essay, Prenshaw examines the role of women, particularly mothers and daughters, in the fiction of Eudora Welty, noting that she depicts Southern women as a source of strength and spiritual healing in her works.
In the following essay, originally published in 1981, O'Brien surveys historical treatments of the South from the prewar decades to Reconstruction, emphasizing the theme of historical continuity.
In the following essay, originally published in 1981, O'Brien surveys historical treatments of the South from the prewar decades to Reconstruction, emphasizing the theme of historical continuity.
In the following essay, Lowe discusses new directions in contemporary Southern fiction, including a reexamination of history, a more central treatment of popular culture, and a greater presence of women authors.
In the following essay, Cardwell presents the subject of dueling as an important element in the “aristocratic” culture of the Old South, one frequently treated by writers of the period.
In the following essay, Chew presents an overview of Rita Mae Brown's novels and essays, focusing on her political consciousness and her treatment of social class and categories in her novels.
In the following essay, Tracey explicates E. D. E. N. Southworth's novel Britomarte, the Man-Hater as it portrays social and ideological disruptions in gender roles caused by the Civil War.
In the following essay, Tracey explicates E. D. E. N. Southworth's novel Britomarte, the Man-Hater as it portrays social and ideological disruptions in gender roles caused by the Civil War.
In the following essay, Thompson contrasts the typically regional focus of nineteenth-century Southern writers with that of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work consistently transcends the literary tropes and stereotypes of his contemporaries.
In the following essay, Raper explores the special role of a sense of place in traditional Southern fiction and suggests that postmodern Southern writers have deliberately reacted against their locale as a limitation in their works.
In the following introduction to her book-length study, MacKethan details the post-Reconstruction literary vision of the Old South as a pastoral paradise.
In the following essay, Rubin examines George Washington Cable's novel John March, Southerner as it illustrates the limitations of the genteel, local color tradition that dominated Southern fiction in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
In the following essay, Bukoski discusses Shirley Ann Grau's fiction in terms of her “home-consciousness”—her use of interior spaces, houses, and dispossession to develop theme and characterization.
In the following essay, Bennett explores the role of humor in Southern literature, particularly as it relates to women writers, focusing on the idea that humor offers a challenge to the status quo.
In the following essay, Hedin concentrates on the new literary strategies of nineteenth-century slave narratives which grafted morality, political awareness, and irony to the simpler, eighteenth-century picaresque narrative tradition.
In the following essay, Cawelti presents an overview of Cormac McCarthy's career, stressing that his works connect the new Western and the new Southern literature genres through a concern for a sense of the failure of white American culture.
In the following essay, Watson illuminates William Gilmore Simms's comparison of Revolutionary America with the antebellum South in his novels of the 1850s and 1860s.
In the following essay, Degler outlines the economic and historical sources of Southern cultural distinctiveness, maintaining nonetheless that differences between Northerners and Southerners in the first half of the nineteenth century were a matter of degree, not kind, and that both groups shared an essential worldview.
In the following essay, originally delivered as an address in 1908, Smith surveys a number of enduring poems by minor pre-Civil War poets and analyzes the reasons for the lack of literary productiveness in the South before the war.
In the following essay, Bakker probes John Pendleton Kennedy's subtle critique of the pastoral ideal in Swallow Barn and his subsequent reaffirmation of this myth in Horse-Shoe Robinson.
In the following essay, Kreyling appraises the literary tastes of the New South in relation to three novelists: Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King, and George Washington Cable.
In the following essay, first published in 1996, Gretlund discusses Josephine Humphreys's existentialism as seen through the choices her characters make in their daily lives and in particular Southern locales.
In the following essay, Suarez examines the poetry of James Dickey and Robert Penn Warren as representative of the modern South, pointing out that their poetry is both regional and highly individual.
In the following essay, Rubin surveys Southern literature of the post-Reconstruction period, concentrating on the local color movement, literary depictions of blacks, and the state of poetry.
In the following essay, Moore chronicles the correspondence of poet Paul Hamilton Hayne with author and critic James Maurice Thompson, particularly as their writing touches upon the theme of postwar reconciliation between North and South.
In the following essay, Moore chronicles the correspondence of poet Paul Hamilton Hayne with author and critic James Maurice Thompson, particularly as their writing touches upon the theme of postwar reconciliation between North and South.
In the following essay, Doherty comments on Harriet Jacobs's skilled application of the narrative conventions of the popular sentimental novel to her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
In the following essay, Shillingsburg studies representative works by Caroline Hentz, Grace King, and Kate Chopin as they reflect women's changing views in the late nineteenth-century American South.
In the following excerpt, Howell summarizes modern historical assessments of the New South, focusing on such themes as Southern distinctiveness, identity, industrialization, economics, populism, and race relations.
In the following essay, Bakker explores the theme of hesitant or repressed rebellion by women in the writings of Caroline Lee Hentz, Caroline Gilman, and Eliza Ann Dupuy.
In the following essay, Werner presents an overview of early nineteenth-century Southern literature, arguing that the Old South played a crucial role in the cultural growth of the fledgling United States despite producing few writers of enduring significance during this time.
In the following essay, Dvorak explores the role of cooking as it relates to a sense of community, spiritual sustenance, women's friendships, and female identity in three Southern novels.
In the following essay, Fine asserts that the Southern locale itself is tangential to Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction and that she concentrates instead on her characters' search for meaning in the wider context of pop culture.
In the following essay, Bakker emphasizes Caroline Lee Hentz's and E. D. E. N. Southworth's manipulation of conventional sentimental devices in their early romances for the purpose of disclosing “unpleasant truths” about life in the South.
In the following essay, MacKethan explores the rhetorical and structural techniques used by writers of the New South in their representation of old plantation myths.
In the following essay, Turner comments on the diversity of the American South, and on the need for further study of lesser Southern authors of the post-Civil War period.
In the following essay, Turner comments on the diversity of the American South, and on the need for further study of lesser Southern authors of the post-Civil War period.
In the following essay, Woodell describes three unusual novels by the little-known Charleston writer F. Colburn Adams that attack Southern hypocrisy and the institution of slavery.
In the following essay, first published in 1954, Welty discusses some general characteristics of Southern literature and praises the work of such modern novelists as William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, and Peter Taylor.
In the following excerpt, Holman stresses the economic and cultural grounds for the dearth of accomplished Southern literature during the years 1800 to 1865, seeing Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod as the only professional writers of merit in the Old South and Poe as its only artist of genius.
In the following essay, Ayers and Mittendorf consider the effects of the Civil War on the lives of Southerners and the literature of the American South.
In the following essay, Ayers and Mittendorf consider the effects of the Civil War on the lives of Southerners and the literature of the American South.
