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How could liberalism and apartheid coexist for decades in our country, as they did during the first half of the twentieth century? This study looks at works by such writers as Thomas Dixon, Erskine Caldwell, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison to show how representations of time in southern narrative first accommodated but finally elucidated the relationship between these two political philosophies. Although racial segregation was codified by U.S. law, says Leigh Anne Duck, nationalist discourse downplayed its significance everywhere but in the South, where apartheid was conceded as an immutable aspect of an anachronistic culture. As the nation modernized, the South serve...
In Keywords for Southern Studies, editors Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson have compiled an eclectic collection of new essays that address the fluidity of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. The essays are structured around critical terms pertinent both to the field and to modern life in general. The nonbinary, nontraditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refutes standard binary thinking—First World/Third World, self/other, for instance—that postcolonial studies revealed as a flawed rhetorical structure for analyzing empire. Instead, Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that begins with southern studies but extends beyond.
"Placing the New Southern Studies in conversation with film studies, this book is simply the best edited collection available on film and the U.S. South.---Grace Hale. University of Virginia --
Analysing the ubiquity of the small town in fiction of the mid-century US South, Living Jim Crow is the first extended scholarly study to explore how authors mobilised this setting as a tool for racial resistance.
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.
Using cultural theory, author R. Bruce Brasell investigates issues surrounding the discursive presentation of the American South as biracial and explores its manifestation in documentary films, including such works as Tell about the South, bro•ken/ground, and Family Name. After considering the emergence of the region's biraciality through a consideration of the concepts of racial citizenry and racial performativity, Brasell examines two problems associated with this framework. First, the framework assumes racial purity, and, second, it assumes that two races exist. In other words, biraciality enacts two denials, first, the existence of miscegenation in the region and, second, the existence...
This study aims to counter right-wing discourses of belonging. It discusses key theoretical concepts for the study of home, focusing in particular on Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic contributions. The book also maintains that postmodern celebrations of nomadism and exile tend to be incapable of providing an alternative to conservative, xenophobic appropriations of home. In detailed readings of one film and six novels, a view is developed according to which home, as a spatio-temporal imaginary, is rooted in our species being, and as such constitutes the inevitable starting point for any progressive politics.
Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text collects eleven essays presented at the Thirty-fifth Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference sponsored by the University of Mississippi in Oxford on July 20-24, 2008. Contributors query the status of Faulkner's literary text in contemporary criticism and scholarship. How do scholars today approach Faulkner's texts? For some, including Arthur F. Kinney and James B. Carothers, "returns of the text" is a phrase that raises questions of aesthetics, poetics, and authority. For others, the phrase serves as an invitation to return to Faulkner's language, to writing and the letter itself. Serena Blount, Owen Robinson, James Harding, and Taylor Hagood ...
Today, debates about globalization raise both hopes and fears. But what about during William Faulkner's time? Was he aware of worldwide cultural, historical, and economic developments? Just how interested was Faulkner in the global scheme of things? The contributors to Global Faulkner suggest that a global context is helpful for recognizing the broader international meanings of Faulkner's celebrated regional landscape. Several scholars address how the flow of capital from the time of slavery through the Cold War period in his fiction links Faulkner's South with the larger world. Other authors explore the literary similarities that connect Faulkner's South to Latin America, Africa, Spain, Japan, and the Caribbean. In essays by scholars from around the world, Faulkner emerges in trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific contexts, in a pan-Caribbean world, and in the space of the Middle Passage and the African Atlantic. The Nobel laureate's fiction is linked to that of such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Wole Soyinka, Miguel de Cervantes, and Kenji Nakagami.
Billy Batson discovers a secret in a forgotten subway tunnel. There the young man meets a wizard who offers a precious gift: a magic word that will transform the newsboy into a hero. When Billy says, "Shazam!," he becomes Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal, one of the most popular comic book characters of the 1940s. This book tells the story of that hero and the writers and artists who created his magical adventures. The saga of Captain Marvel is also that of artist C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder, one of the most innovative and prolific creative teams working during the Golden Age of comics in the United States. While Beck was the technician and meticulous craftsman, Binder cont...