San Antonio College Library

This book is a major reassessment of an American region and a regional consciousness. Concentrating on moments of crisis in Southern history, as well as on major literary figures, Richard Gray shows how generations of Southerners have been engaged in 'writing the South', in reinventing their place even as they describe it. The first half of the book focuses on the colonial period, when the first white settlers tried to understand an unfamiliar land...

"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...

This perceptive study of a major cultural movement shows how Southern writers of 1930 t0 1955 tried to come to terms with Southern tradition, and discusses the resulting body of significant literature - fiction, poetry, memoirs, and historical writing.

Few inhabitants of the South in 1800 thought of it as a ""region"" or of themselves as ""southerners."" In time, the need to defend the entire southern way of life became obsessive for many writers, too often precluding efforts at originality in form or style. Especially after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, southern identity and southern nationalism emerged as the grand themes, and literature became subservient to regional interests. The devastation...

"In Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. studies current Southern authors of novels, historical fiction, and contemporary fiction who have been breaking the mold of Southern literature by looking westward. Cut loose, in the postmodern age, from traditional roots in a sense of place, contemporary Southern writers have explored an American West shaped by the myths of lawless freedom and...

In this beautifully realized study, Bertram Wyatt-Brown explores the defining role of melancholy in southern literature from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, when it evolved into modernist alienation. Deeply marked by high death rates, social dread, and bitter defeat, white southerners imposed a climate of parochial pride, stifling conventions of masculinity, social condescension, and mistrust of intellectualism. Many writers experienced...

"Surveys the revivification and reinvention of southern culture and literature, and the influence of the Agrarians, Fugitives, New Critics, and popular writers, including John Gould Fletcher, Robert Penn Warren, Monroe K. Spears, Walter Sullivan, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, William Humphrey, and Cormac McCarthy"--Provided by publisher