Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - General

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. In the book's final essay, Lewis P. Simpson reflects on the history of New Orleans as a literary center, giving special emphasis to Percy's The Moviegoer and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.

"This is a well-organized, gracefully written account of a significant aspect of Southern fiction, and it contains information and incisive commentary that one can find nowhere else." --Thomas Daniel Young

Many southern writers imagined the South as a qualified dream of Arcady. They retained the glow of the golden land as a device to expose or rebuke, to confront or escape the complexities of the actual times in which they lived.

The Dream of Arcady examines the work of post-Civil War southern writers who criticize the myth of the South as pastoral paradise. Sooner or later in all...

Southern Mothers, a collection of critical essays by prominent southern literary scholars, examines the significance of motherhood in southern fiction. The belle, the mammy, religion, and racism are several of the distinctive threads with which southern women writers have woven the fabric of their stories. Bringing southern motherhood into focus -- with all its peculiarities of attitude and tradition -- the essays speak to both the established and the unconventional modes of motherhood that are typical in southern writing and probe the extent to which southern women writers have rejected...

The thirty years prior to the Civil War were flamboyant and fiery times for the South. People had a passion for political issues and an ear for the lusty oratory that could be heard at any gathering, social or political. In Oratory in the Old South, Waldo Braden and his associates looked past the popular myths of that era and uncovered the true nature of the oratory of the times.

In this sequel to that earlier volume, Braden and seven other speech scholars examine the oratory of accommodation that dominated the southern forum in the post-Civil War years. Speakers of this era, they find,...

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...

The four novels examined here represent very different experiences, but in...

Previously, the proteges of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Robert Penn Warren have received considerable scholarly attention only as individuals or in relation to small groups of close-knit writers within single literary genres. Now, for the first time, this far-ranging group of accomplished writers is united as part of a larger phenomenon, the Fugitive legacy, which has extended its influence far beyond the parameters of southern literature.

In The Fugitive Legacy, Charlotte H. Beck demonstrates the strong influence of the Nashville Fugitives as teachers, editors,...

Robert Penn Warren was unique among twentieth-century American writers for having achieved excellence in a broad and assorted range of genres: poems, novels, plays, critical works, historical essays, personal essays, biography, and innovative textbooks. In this collection of essays, critics and poets -- among the finest Warren scholars -- assess Warren's legacy within his various genres and illuminate his centrality to twentieth-century American culture.

Although Warren was best known for his novel All the King's Men, the fact that most of these essays focus on his poetry attests to the...