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In this stimulating collection of essays, twenty scholars apply new theoretical approaches to the fiction and poetry of southern writers ranging from Poe to Dickey, from Faulkner to Hurston. Departing from earlier traditions of southern literary scholarship, this book seeks not to create a new orthodoxy but to suggest the diversity of critical tools that can now be used to explore the literature and culture of the South. Including essays based on deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist theory, the book features contributions from such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Joan DeJean. Yet, for all their variety, the essayists share the same central concern. "We have in common," writes Jefferson Humphries, "one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not in the immanence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the 'human sciences' that study both, are interrelated." Instead of simply taking "the South" for granted, the contributors to this volume see it as a text and an idea--as something whose ideological underpinnings, complexities, and contradictions must be subjected to close reading and questioning. Southern Literature and Literary Theory represents a major effort to redefine the relationship of southern writing and the South itself to the larger world.
In this stimulating collection of essays, twenty scholars apply new theoretical approaches to the fiction and poetry of southern writers ranging from Poe to Dickey, from Faulkner to Hurston. Departing from earlier traditions of southern literary scholarship, this book seeks not to create a new orthodoxy but to suggest the diversity of critical tools that can now be used to explore the literature and culture of the South. Including essays based on deconstructionist, feminist, and Marxist theory, the book features contributions from such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Fred Chappell, and Joan DeJean. Yet, for all their variety, the essayists share the same central concern. "We have in common," writes Jefferson Humphries, "one thing that sets us apart from our elders in our conception of the South and our approach to southern literature: the basic assumption that the meaning and significance of literature is not in the immanence of the literary object, or in history, but in the complex ways in which the literary, the historical, and all the 'human sciences' that study both, are interrelated." Instead of simply taking "the South" for granted, the contributors to this volume see it as a text and an idea--as something whose ideological underpinnings, complexities, and contradictions must be subjected to close reading and questioning. Southern Literature and Literary Theory represents a major effort to redefine the relationship of southern writing and the South itself to the larger world.
In this innovative approach to southern literary cultures, Thadious Davis analyzes how black southern writers use their spatial location to articulate the vexed connections between society and environment, particularly under segregation and its legacies.<
I take...an outward route, arguing that the Agrarian project was and must be seen as a willed campaign on the part of one elite to establish and control 'the South' in a period of intense cultural maneuvering. The principal organizers of I'll Take My Stand knew full well there were other 'Souths' than the one they touted; they deliberately presented a fabricated South as the one and only real thing. In Inventing Southern Literature Michael Kreyling casts a penetrating ray upon the traditional canon of southern literature and questions the modes by which it was created. He finds that it was, indeed, an invention rather than a creation. In the 1930s the foundations were laid by the Fugitive-Agrarian group, a band of poet-critics that wished not only to design but also to control the southern cultural entity in a conservative political context. From their heyday to the present, Kreyling investigates the historical conditions under which literary and cultural critics have invented the South and how they have chosen its representations. Through his study of these choices, Kreyling argues that interested groups have shaped meanings that preserve a South as the South. As the Fugitive-Agrarians molded the region according to their definition in I'll Take My Stand, they professed to have developed a critical method that disavowed any cultural or political intent or content, a claim that Kreyling disproves. He shows that their torch was taken by Richard Weaver on the Right and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., on the Center-Left and that both critics tried to preserve the Fugitive-Agrarian credo despite the severe stresses imposed during the era of desegregation. As the southern literary paradigm has been attacked and defended, certain issues have remained in the forefront. Kreyling takes on three: reconciling the imperatives of race with the traditional definitions of the South; testing the ways white women writers of the South have negotiated space within or outside the paradigm; and analyzing the critics' use and abuse of William Faulkner (the major figure of southern literature) as they have relied on his achievement to anchor the total project called Southern Literature. Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, is the author of several books, including "Eudora Welty's Achievement of Order" and "Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell."
Examines Southern writers in a Celtic context. This debut book of literary criticism challenges the common perception that the culture of white Southerners springs from English, or Anglo-Norman, roots. Mr. Cantrell presents persuasive historical and literary evidence that it was the South's Celtic, or Scots-Irish, settlers who had the biggest influence on Southern culture, and that their vibrant spirit is still felt today. It discusses the work of William Gilmore Simms, Ellen Glasgow, the Agrarians, William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Flannery O'Connor, Pat Conroy, and James Everett Kibler.
"The concept of masculinity has had a profound influence on modern gay-written and gay-themed American Southern literature. Much of the fiction and drama of three important contemporary writers - Tennessee Williams, Charles Nelson, and Reynolds Price - has been shaped by the cultural dynamics of the Southern tradition of codified definitions and parameters of masculinity. This regional approach to literature also serves as critically protective, maintaining its focus in an effort to avoid essentializing experience and identity. Gay Men in Modern Southern Literature will be a valuable asset in the study of gender construction, literary theory, and modern American Southern writing."--Publisher's website.
A challenge to traditional criticism, this engaging study demonstrates that issues of sexuality-and same-sex desire in particular-were of central importance in the literary production of the Southern Renaissance. Especially during the end of that period-approximately the 1940s and 1950s-the national literary establishment tacitly designated the South as an allowable setting for fictionalized deviancy, thus permitting southern writers tremendous freedom to explore sexual otherness. In Lovers and Beloveds, Gary Richards draws on contemporary theories of sexuality in reading the fiction of six writers of the era who accepted that potentially pejorative characterization as an opportunity: Truman Capote, William Goyen, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, and Richard Wright. Richards skillfully juxtaposes forgotten texts by those writers with canonical works to identify the complex narratives of same-sex desire. In their novels and stories, the authors consistently reimagine gender roles, centralize homoeroticism, and probe its relationship with class, race, biological sex, and southern identity. This is the first book to assess the significance of same-sex desire in a broad range of southern texts, making a crucial contribution to the study of both literature and sexuality.
Taking Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place as a starting point, contributors to this exciting collection continue the work of critically and creatively remapping the South through their freewheeling studies of southern literature and culture. Appraising representations of the South within a context that is postmodern, diverse, widely inclusive, and international, the essays present multiple ways of imagining the South and examine both new places and old landscapes in an attempt to tie the mythic southern balloon down to earth. In his foreword, an insightful discussion of numerous Souths and the ways they are perceived, Richard Gray explains one of the key goals of the book: to open up to scrutiny the literary and cultural practice that has come to be known as “regionalism.” Part I, “Surveying the Territory,” theorizes definitions of place and region, and includes an analysis of southern literary regionalism from the 1930s to the present and an exploration of southern popular culture. In “Mapping the Region,” essayists examine different representations of rural landscapes and small towns, cities and suburbs, as well as liminal zones in which new immigrants make their homes. Reflecting the contributors’ transatlantic perspective, “Making Global Connections” challenges notions of southern distinctiveness by reading the region through the comparative frameworks of Southern Italy, East Germany, Latin America, and the United Kingdom and via a range of texts and contexts—from early reconciliation romances to Faulkner’s fictions about race to the more recent parody of southern mythmaking, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone. Together, these essays explore the roles that economic, racial, and ideological tensions have played in the formation of southern identity through varying representations of locality, moving regionalism toward a “new place” in southern studies.
The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching Southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South--global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South--that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of Southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum Southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth-century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of Southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical Southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.
In Southern Hyperboles: Metafigurative Strategies of Narration, Michał Choiński confronts the often paradoxical and excessive elements of southern literature, focusing on dominant narrative modes and representation strategies in works produced from the early 1930s to the late 1950s. With renewed attention to renderings of the gothic and grotesque, Choiński argues that modernist literature from the U.S. South often deploys the trope of hyperbole, which escalates contrasts and disrupts the sense of the normal. By focusing on how writers processed the South via narratives of hyperbolic excess, Southern Hyperboles explores a mode of comprehension forged from the tensions of a segregated, patriarchal society driven by racial and social decorum. Moving chronologically, Choiński traces distinct manifestations of hyperbolic metalogic in the works of seven authors: Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor, and Harper Lee. The mode of hyperbole identified by Choiński relies on a clash of opposites, along with the rapid intensification of disharmonious ideas pushed to extremes, leading to an ultimate break in established decorum. The shock produced by hyperbole generates a momentary state of confusion that soon dissipates, allowing recipients to reach a new understanding of their surrounding world. Melding an innovative use of rhetorical theory with fine-grained analysis of literary texts, Southern Hyperboles elucidates contradictory and interlocking issues related to memory, social trauma, grotesquerie, and troubled mythologies that permeate the U.S. South.