One of the most often repeated anecdotes about the direction of literary studies over the past three decades concerns a graduate student who complained of reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening in three classes and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in none. But Chopin has not always been featured in the literary curriculum. Though she achieved national success in her lifetime (1850--1904) as a writer of Louisiana "local color" fiction, after her death her work fell into obscurity until 1969, when Norwegian literary scholar Per Seyersted published The Complete Works of Kate Chopin and sparked a...
One of the most often repeated anecdotes about the direction of literary studies over the past three decades concerns a graduate student who compla...
Throughout his career, William Faulkner produced a literary discourse remarkably contiguous with other discourses of American culture, but seldom has his work been explored as a participant in the shifts and ruptures that characterize modern discursive systems. Charles Hannon argues in his brilliant new study that the language of Faulkner's fiction is replete with the voiced conflicts that shaped America and the South from the 1920s to1950. Specifically, Hannon takes five contemporary debates -- in historiography, law, labor, ethnography, and film -- and relates them both to canonical and...
Throughout his career, William Faulkner produced a literary discourse remarkably contiguous with other discourses of American culture, but seldom h...
In a major reinterpretation, Resisting History reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more important role in shaping the landscape of modernism than has been previously acknowledged. Here Barbara Ladd offers powerful new readings of three southern writers who reimagined authorship between World War I and the mid-1950s.
Ladd argues that the idea of a "new woman" -- released from some of the traditional constraints of family and community, more mobile, and participating in new contractual forms of relationality -- precipitated a highly...
In a major reinterpretation, Resisting History reveals that women, as subjects of writing and as writing subjects themselves, played a far more imp...