Called the greatest Civil War historian, Shelby Foote began his career as a novelist whose powerful works of fiction rose out of his closeness to life and culture in his native region, the Mississippi Delta country. Later in his career he transformed modern historical prose by his keen sense of the novel. His artistic distance from the elements of regionalism that lie at the heart both of his novels and of his history writing gives his prose great narrative force.

This perceptive study fills the genuine need for a sound critical appreciation of Foote the novelist. After he appeared as a...

Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee...

Since its publication in 1936, Gone with the Wind has held a unique position in American cultural memory, both for its particular vision of the American South in the age of the Civil War and for its often controversial portrayals of race, gender, and class. New Approaches to "Gone with the Wind" offers neither apology nor rehabilitation for the novel and its Oscar-winning film adaptation. Instead, the nine essays provide distinct, compelling insights that challenge and complicate conventional associations.

Racial and sexual identity form a cornerstone of the collection: Mark C. Jerng and...

Essays in Rough South, Rural South describe and discuss the work of southern writers who began their careers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They fall into two categories. Some, born into the working class, strove to become writers and learned without benefit of higher education, such writers as Larry Brown and William Gay. Others came from lower- or middle-class backgrounds and became writers through practice and education: Dorothy Allison, Tom Franklin, Tim Gautreaux, Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Silas House, Jill McCorkle, Chris Offutt, Ron Rash, Lee...

The Language of Vision celebrates and interprets the complementary expressions of photography and literature in the South. Southern imagery and text affect one another, explains Joseph R. Millichap, as intertextual languages and influential visions. Focusing on the 1930s, and including significant works both before and after this preeminent decade, Millichap uncovers fascinating convergences between mediums, particularly in the interplay of documentary realism and subjective modernism.

Millichap's subjects range from William Faulkner's fiction, perhaps the best representation of literary...

Southern literature has long been heralded for its tragic sentiments, in its somber and necessary acknowledgments of the region's tormented past, as it has concomitantly asserted an overarchingly heteronormative vision of Southern life. Yet a pantheon of great authors, ranging from Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote to the present-day voices of Florence King, Dorothy Allison, and David Sedaris, collectively attest both to the vibrancy of queer experience and to the prevalence of humor found in this rich regional canon. In "Precious Perversions: Humor, Homosexuality,...

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America's natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah...

The California farmlands have long served as a popular symbol of America's natural abundance and endless opportunity. Yet, from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart to Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus, many novels, plays, movies, and songs have dramatized the brutality and hardships of working in the California fields. Little scholarship has focused on what these cultural productions tell us about who belongs in America, and in what ways they are allowed to belong. In The Nature of California, Sarah...