Bücher der Reihe Southern Literary Studies

The New Orleans writer Grace King was an intensely loyal daughter of the South. Fostered by bitter memories of the Civil War, her loyalty was kept burning by her family's struggle to regain its wealth and maintain its social position. In this volume, Robert Bush discusses King's life and her art.

Recent interest in the life and works of John Crowe Ransom has brought to light the many apparent contradictions and discontinuities in the career of this important man of letters. In John Crowe Ransom's Secular Faith, Keiran Quinlan offers a substantially revisionist interpretation of his subject.

Writing from a conviction of the centrality and worth of Walker Percy's work, as well as from the idea that fresh criticism is of value not only to readers but to living authors as well, the essayists in this collection present diverse approaches to understanding his art.

The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: "Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community." Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt's most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of "bright mulatto" caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage. Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation's moral progress. Andrews argues that "along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history." Although Chesnutt's career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America's race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will. William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author's times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt's works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.

Daniel Hoffman's bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form.

Presents an innovative study of Flannery O'Connor's fiction by exploring the dialogic forces at work in her writing. Drawing on the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin, Robert Brinkmeyer offers an explanation for the great depth and power of O'Connor's work, paying particular attention to the ways her art and audience bear upon her regnant Catholic vision.

In the twenty years of its existence, the second series of the Southern Review continued the editorial orientation of the first series by presenting a range of regional and cosmopolitan works of fiction. This anthology is a collection of twenty-five short stories from the nearly three hundred published in the journal between 1965 and 1985.

Until recently most discussions of William Faulkner have centred exclusively on his novels. Yet no chronicle of Faulkner's Growth as a literary artist can afford to overlook the years he spent struggling to establish himself as a writer of short stories. Max Putzel provides a critical study of these crucial formative years.

Shows how Robert Penn Warren's work, his fiction, poetry, literary criticism, historical and personal essays, journalism, is shaped largely by the circumstances not only of his birth and early career as a border-state southerner but also oh his training and later career as a transregional artist and intellectual.

Biographical sketches of 378 writers associated with the American South are included in this important new reference work. Compiled by 172 scholars, these summaries--many of which are not readily available elsewhere--provide in their total effect a brief history of southern literature from colonial times to the present.The volume is, in part, a companion to A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Louis D. Rubin, Jr., ed.), a work that has become a standard reference for anyone seriously interested in the literature of the South. With its wealth of essential biographical information on the region's writers, both major and minor, this new guide will take its place alongside that earlier volume as an invaluable aid to the study of southern writing. Especially useful will be complete listings of the first printings of the books by each writer provided after the respective summaries.Included as contributors of the individual biographical summaries are most of the better-known scholars of southern literature, plus a number of promising young scholars. The editors, each of whom is an outstanding scholar in southern literary studies, are:

Kate Chopin was a nationally acclaimed short story artist of the local colour school when she in 1899 shocked the American reading public with The Awakening. This volume provides an extensive re-examination of both the life and work of Kate Chopin, basing it on her total oeuvre.