Southern

Flannery O'connor And The Christ-Haunted South

Forty years after her death, Flannery O'Connor's fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those looking to deepen their appreciation of this literary icon, "Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South" breaks important new ground, using O'Connor's work as a window onto its own regional and religious ethos. According to Ralph Wood, it is O'Connor the Southerner and the believer who best helps us to confront hard cultural questions — including the role of fundamentalism, the legacy of slavery, and the lure of nihilism — with profound religious answers.

Conversations With Larry Brown (Literary Conversations Series)

In a fifteen-year period beginning in 1988, Mississippi native Larry Brown (1951-2004) published two collections of short stories, five novels, a memoir, and a collection of essays. Two of his novels, Joe and Father and Son, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Brown wrote with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty about the struggles of rural and small-town working-class southerners. Twenty-nine years old when his writing career began, Brown's plainspoken style, sharp eye for detail, and keen ear for dialogue quickly established him as one of the most respected and compelling new voices in contemporary southern literature.

Conversations with Larry Brown brings together interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004. The collection includes interview material from a full-length film documentary about Brown's life and work, as well as two previously unpublished pieces. Across these conversations, Brown offers insights into all of his books and several of his short stories.

Gather At The River: Notes From The Post-millennial South (Southern Literary Studies)

To read Hal Crowther is to find yourself agreeing with views on topics you never knew you cared so much about. In Gather at the River, Crowther extends the wide-angle vision of Southern life presented in his highly acclaimed collection Cathedrals of Kudzu. He cuts to the heart of recent political, religious, and cultural issues but pauses to appreciate the sweet things that the South has to offer, like music, baseball, great writers, and strong women. Some of these essays invite debate. Crowther gives a balanced perspective on the tragedy of the Branch Davidians at Waco, shedding light on a different world of religiosity and revealing urban media prejudices for what they are. He describes the unique heroism of a fallen Marine in the Iraq war, a war fought by one class and promoted by another. And his solution to racial conflict—interracial procreation—will jump-start readers' sensibilities. In other chapters, Crowther discusses the grim portrayal of the South in early film and the triumphs of Southern music. His literary essays include appreciations of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Elizabeth Spencer, and Wendell Berry, and a biting lampoon of exhibitionist memoirs. Among the Southerners Crowther profiles with pride are the art historian and Museum of Modern Art curator Kirk Varnedoe; the great, cursed baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson; the curmudgeonly realist H. L. Mencken; and the singer Dolly Parton, whose candid artifice inspires the author's litmus test for Southern authenticity.

In the writing of Hal Crowther, lyrical language joins wit and frankness, and the South—with all its burdens, curiosities, and promises—comes vividly into view. Gather at the River enhances Crowther's reputation as one of the most eloquent and original observers of Southern letters, morals, and manners.

Flannery O'Connor's Religious Imagination: A World With Everything Off Balance

Flannery O'Connor's deep Catholic faith permeated her writing, sometimes in unexpected ways. Indeed, her very imaginative and sometimes grotesque characters were often searching for redemption, many seeking God's grace through unusual, even bizarre means. Flannery O'Connor used many tools in crafting her work, especially the use of irony and the darker dimensions of humor. She strongly opposed the increased secularism of the modern world, and what she saw as its pervasive nihilism.

George Kilcourse, Jr., uses Flannery O'Connor's correspondence with her friends and associates to help define her approach to writing, and to give insight into her literary characters. Her roots in the deep South color much of her work.

This book provides important insights into the life, work, and faith of Flannery O'Connor. It will be ideal for use in college theology or literature classes, although the general reader will also benefit from it. Indeed, anyone wishing to explore the religious dynamic in O'Connor's writing will appreciate this fascinating book.

The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction

River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Southern Literary Studies)

Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself—and the world's conception of America.

As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the imagination of the times, and explores its cultural position in antebellum literature, art, thought, and national life.

Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images which developed as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. In contrast, he examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose notorious views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery.

As the antebellum period progresses, Smith discusses the importance of visual representations of the Mississippi, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's "The ConfidenceMan." An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a postwar nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature.

From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself. AUTHOR BIO: Thomas Ruys Smith is a lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Alias Bill Arp: Charles Henry Smith and the South's Goodly Heritage

The History of Southern Women's Literature (Southern Literary Studies)

Many of America's foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eduora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as "southern" if her work reflects the region's grip on life, Mary Louise Weaks and Carolyn Perry have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women's literature. Their comprehensive history-the first of its kind in a relatively young field-extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences.

The History of Southern Women's Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing-these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here and their essays discuss a wealth of women's issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles-from the belle to the mammy-and real life behind the façade of meeting others' expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind.

The history of southern women's literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an "insidious tradition," to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women's and literary studies.

Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (Study Guide)

A lively, in-depth discussion of ALL THE KING'S MEN. Students are taken on an exciting journey of discovery through every scene or chapter. Also included are unique text notes, ideas for term papers, notes on the author's life, as well as a glossary.

Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers And Writing