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The New South--replete with shopping malls, hub airports, educated African Americans, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti--is still haunted by the Gothic ghosts of its past. Does the collision between past and present account for the continued preeminence of Southern writers in America's literary culture? Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus are just a few of the writers who draw on a new kind of Southern background while reaching out to a broad American readership. Yet many of these writers have been accused of catering to the stereotypes they think a national audience requires. It would seem that questions of Southern identity continue to be bound up with rage against attacks on Southern culture. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe have assembled a remarkable team of scholars and writers to examine aspects of the contemporary literature of the South. From Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Fred Hobson to esteemed scholar James Olney to poets Kate Daniels and Brenda Marie Osbey, the contributors try to define Southern culture today and ask who will be writing Southern literature tomorrow. Addressing topics such as humor, the past, black autobiography, ethnicity, and female oral traditions, the essays form a volume that is of interest to readers of Southern literature and history, creative writers, and scholars and students of Southern culture.
Until recently, the American South has often been treated in isolation by historians and literary critics. In these essays five scholars of southern history and literature evaluate elements of contemporary--and future--southern experience, including place, community, culture, class, gender, and racial roles. Fred Hobson observes in his introductory essay that the U.S. South must be seen in relation to a larger world--the Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as European countries with a similar grounding in hardship and defeat. Moreover, the South can no longer be viewed in black-and-white terms--especially if the subject is race. Joel Williamson's essay challenges fellow historians to broaden their purview by getting acquainted with Gone with the Wind, Elvis Presley, and other phenomena of southern culture(s). Linda Wagner-Martin discusses the innovative ways in which contemporary southern writers such as Charles Frazier take on traditional southern concerns and shows us how "place becomes space" for Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, and other southern-born writers whose works are often set outside the geographical South. Thadious Davis looks at the "youngsters" of southern poetry, fiction, and drama, revealing how their work reflects a racially and ethnically mixed, digitized, and otherwise reconfigured South. In the writings of Shay Youngblood, Randall Kenan, Donna Tartt, Mona Lisa Salloy, and others, one can see the collapsing of distinctions between the literary and the popular, and a greater comfort with social fluidity and mobility. The concluding essay by Edward Ayers, set in 2076, offers a witty glimpse of things-perhaps-to-come. Through a series of short dispatches from a sixteen-year-old narrator of Scottish-Ghanian-Honduran-Korean-Cherokee descent, Ayers transports us to the Consolidated South that counts Incarceration Incorporated among its largest employers. As these writings signal new depths and directions in southern historical and literary studies, they compose a witty and erudite album of snapshots, revealing a region on the verge of big changes.
For generations, southern novelists and critics have grappled with a concept that is widely seen as a trademark of their literature: a strong attachment to geography, or a "sense of place." In the 1930s, the Agrarians accorded special meaning to rural life, particularly the farm, in their definitions of southern identity. For them, the South seemed an organic and rooted region in contrast to the North, where real estate development and urban sprawl evoked a faceless, raw capitalism. By the end of the twentieth century, however, economic and social forces had converged to create a modernized South. How have writers responded to this phenomenon? Is there still a sense of place in the South, or perhaps a distinctly postsouthern sense of place? Martyn Bone innovatively draws upon postmodern thinking to consider the various perspectives that southern writers have brought to the concept of "place" and to look at its fate in a national and global context. He begins with a revisionist assessment of the Agrarians, who failed in their attempts to turn their proprietary ideal of the small farm into actual policy but whose broader rural aesthetic lived on in the work of neo-Agrarian writers, including William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. By the 1950s, adherence to this aesthetic was causing southern writers and critics to lose sight of the social reality of a changing South. Bone turns to more recent works that do respond to the impact of capitalist spatial development on the South -- and on the nation generally -- including that self-declared "international city" Atlanta. Close readings of novels by Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Richard Ford, Anne Rivers Siddons, Tom Wolfe, and Toni Cade Bambara illuminate evolving ideas about capital, land, labor, and class while introducing southern literary studies into wider debates around social, cultural, and literary geography. Bone concludes his remarkably rich book by considering works of Harry Crews and Barbara Kingsolver that suggest the southern sense of place may be not only post-Agrarian or postsouthern but also transnational.
From slave narratives to the Civil War, and from country music to Southern sport, this Companion is the definitive guide to the literature and culture of the American South. Includes discussion of the visual arts, music, society, history, and politics in the region Combines treatment of major literary works and historical events with a survey of broader themes, movements and issues Explores the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Huston, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty, as well as those - black and white, male and female - who are writing now Co-edited by the esteemed scholar Richard Gray, author of the acclaimed volume, A History of American Literature (Blackwell, 2003)
This first volume of "CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual picks up where its predecessor, the acclaimed biannual periodical "CrossRoads: A Journal of Southern Culture, left off when the latter ceased publication in the mid-1990s. Formerly edited by several graduate students affiliated with the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture (primarily by current editor Ted Olson), "Cross Roads: A Southern Culture Annual will continue its original mission: to provide a forum for diverse perspectives on the South and on Southern culture through combining compelling new fiction and poetry from well-known as well as emerging Southern authors, with eloquent articles, memoirs, oral histories, and photo essays that interpret and celebrate relevant manifestations of the Southern cultural experience. "CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual will deepen readers' awareness of and connection to the South.
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South Africa was the hope of the world. It had an impressive and rich tradition of left politics. At the heart of post-apartheid democracy-making was a revolutionary nationalist ANC, the oldest Communist Party in Africa, the SACP, and one of the most militant labour union federations in the world, COSATU. Yet, South Africa is at a crossroads and many are deeply concerned about its future. This book explains through a political economy/ecology analysis why and how the degeneration of national liberation politics has happened, while making praxis-centered arguments for a new transformative left politics.

Rural Development

United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. Subcommittee on Rural Development

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 688


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