Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry

ISBN-13: 9780813920740 / Angielski / Miękka / 2001 / 328 str.

David Rigsbee; Steven Ford Brown

Opis

Mencken's stinging characterization of the American South as -the Sahara of the Bozart- reflects an understandable frustration with the narrow view of the canon of southern literature. With its focus on novelists, it largely ignores the works of all but a few poets--the Fugitives Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom, and the larger-than-life James Dickey among them. Invited Guest is the first anthology that attempts to reach beyond this small coterie to encompass the range and brilliance of twentieth-century southern poetry. Editors David Rigsbee and Steven Ford Brown have compiled the works of a richly diverse collection of poets--all born or raised southerners.Women and African Americans are recognized for their alternative, subversive contributions to southern aesthetics; the myopic, often scathing views of the New Critics or the overly historicist agendas of identity politics are discarded in favor of a middle ground that allows for inclusion on both aesthetic and historical bases.Along with a respectful acknowledgement of the contributions of the most popular figures in southern poetry, Rigsbee and Brown offer long-overdue attention to underrecognized poets such as Anne Spencer, John Beecher, Eleanor Ross Taylor, and Alice Dunbar Nelson. The juxtaposition of the canonical and the little-known makes Invited Guest an intriguing illustration of the abundance and range of poetry in the twentieth-century South.

"Invited Guest, as is the case with really good anthologies, significantly shapes the history of the literature it surveys."- Mary Ellis Gibson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, editor of Homeplaces: Stories of the South by Women Writers"Rigsbee and Brown have selected not only the well-known or signature poems, but also poems that are not often anthologized, making Invited Guest fresh and interesting. This work is enjoyable and informative, incisive and insightful."- Joanne V. Gabbin, James Madison University, editor of The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry