Understanding Lee Smith

Understanding Lee Smith

Author: Danielle N. Johnson

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2018-07-31

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1611178819

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A comprehensive treatment of the life and work of this award-winning feminist Appalachian writer Since the release of her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, in 1968, Lee Smith has published nearly twenty books, including novels, short stories, and memoirs. She has received an O. Henry Award, Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction, and a Reader's Digest Award; and her New York Times best-selling novel, The Last Girls, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. While Smith has garnered academic and critical respect for many of her novels, such as Black Mountain Breakdown, Oral History, and Fair and Tender Ladies, her writing has been viewed by some as lightweight fiction or even "chick lit." In Understanding Lee Smith Danielle N. Johnson offers a comprehensive analysis of Smith's work, including her memoir, Dimestore, treating her as a major Appalachian and feminist voice. Johnson begins with a biographical sketch of Smith's upbringing in Appalachia, her formal education, and her career. She explicates the themes and stylistic qualities that have come to characterize Smith's writing and outlines the criticism of Smith's work, particularly that which focuses on female subjectivity, artistry, religion, history, and place in her fiction. Too often, Johnson argues, Smith's consistent and powerful messages about artistry, gender roles, and historical discourse are missed or undervalued by readers and critics caught up in her quirky characters and dialogue. In Understanding Lee Smith, Johnson offers an analysis of Smith's oeuvre chronologically to study her growth as a writer and to highlight major events in her career and the influence they had on her work, including a major shift in the early 1990s to writing about families, communities, and women living in the mountains. Johnson reveals how Smith has refined her talent for creating nuanced voices and a narrative web of multiple perspectives and evolved into a writer of fine literary fiction worthy of critical study.


The New Southern Girl

The New Southern Girl

Author: Caren J. Town

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-01-24

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0786482036

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Much has been written about America's troubled teens, particularly endangered teenage girls. Works like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and many others have contributed to the general perception that contemporary young women are in a state of crisis. Parents, educators, social scientists, and other concerned individuals worry that our nation's girls are losing their ambition, moral direction, and self-esteem as they enter adolescence--which can then lead them to promiscuous sex, anorexia, drug abuse, and at the very least, declining math scores. In spite of evidence to the contrary in life and literature, this bleak picture is seldom challenged, but a good place to begin may be with recent literary representations of young women, fictional and autobiographical, which show proud young women who are highly focused and use their brains and good humor to work toward satisfying adult lives. This book addresses the ways in which 12 women writers use their heroines' stories to challenge commonly held and frequently damaging notions of adolescence, femininity, and regional identity. The book begins with a chapter on sociological and literary theories of adolescent female development. This chapter also includes theoretically informed discussions of young adult fiction and Southern literature. Chapters that follow focus on adolescent heroines in the novels and autobiographies of the contemporary Southern women writers Anne Tyler, Bobbie Ann Mason, Josephine Humphreys, Dorothy Allison, Kaye Gibbons, Tina Ansa, Janisse Ray and Jill McCorkle and young adult writers Katherine Paterson, Mildred Taylor and Cynthia Voigt. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.


Lee Smith

Lee Smith

Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1476636664

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This literary companion surveys the works of Lee Smith, a Southern author lauded for her autobiographical familiarity with Appalachian settings and characters. Her dialogue captures the distinct voices of mountain people and their perceptions of local and world events, ranging from the Civil War to ecology and modernization. Mental and physical disability and the Southern cultural norm of including the disabled as both family and community members are recurring themes in Smith's writing. An A to Z arrangement of entries incorporates specific titles, and themes such as belonging, healing and death, humor, parenting and religion.


Indigeneity in the Courtroom

Indigeneity in the Courtroom

Author: Jennifer A. Hamilton

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-11-14

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1135864446

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The central question of this book is when and how does indigeneity in its various iterations – cultural, social, political, economic, even genetic – matter in a legal sense? Indigeneity in the Courtroom focuses on the legal deployment of indigenous difference in US and Canadian courts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Through ethnographic and historical research, Hamilton traces dimensions of indigeneity through close readings of four legal cases, each of which raises important questions about law, culture, and the production of difference. She looks at the realm of law, seeking to understand how indigeneity is legally produced and to apprehend its broader political and economic implications.


Media and Ethnic Identity

Media and Ethnic Identity

Author: Ritva Levo-Henriksson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-11-21

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1135909393

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Media and Ethnic Identity carries a Native American perspective to media and its role in ethnic identity construction. This perspective is gained through a case study of the Hopis, who live in northeast Arizona and are known for their devotion to their indigenous culture. The research data is built on a number of interviews with Hopis of a variety of ages from nine villages. The study also makes use of the results of a survey of a large number of students in the Hopi Jr./Sr. High School. The framework for examining the research data is intercultural communication (both interpersonal and media-mediated) between an indigenous group and a majority from the viewpoint of the indigenous group. This book provides tools for understanding the experiences of communication between social and political minorities and majorities from the indigenous perspective.


The State, Removal and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Mexico, 1620-2000

The State, Removal and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Mexico, 1620-2000

Author: Claudia Haake

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-11-21

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1135903166

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This book investigates the forced migration of the Delawares in the United States and the Yaquis in Mexico, focusing primarily on the impact removal from tribal lands had on the (ethnic) identity of these two indigenous societies. It analyzes Native responses to colonial and state policies to determine the practical options that each group had in dealing with the states in which they lived. Haake convincingly argues that both nation-states aimed at the destruction of the Native American societies within their borders. This exemplary comparative, transnational study clearly demonstrates that the legacy of these attitudes and policies are readily apparent in both countries today. This book should appeal to a wide variety of academic disciplines in which diversity and minority political representation assume significance.


The State and Indigenous Movements

The State and Indigenous Movements

Author: Keri E. Iyall Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1135861781

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Using the comparative historical method, this book looks at the experience of indigenous peoples, specifically the Native Hawaiians, showing how a nation can express culture and citizenship while seeking ways to attain greater sovereignty over territory, culture, and politics.


The Present Politics of the Past

The Present Politics of the Past

Author: Seán Patrick Eudaily

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-10-29

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1135931518

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Each phrase in the title of this work gives a clue as to its purpose and agenda. "Thepresent politics of the past" refers to the conditions that have arisen in the recent politicsof advanced liberal states with indigenous populations (such as the U.S., Canada,Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia) where "the past" is an issue or even at stake incontemporary struggles.


Native American and Chicano/a Literature of the American Southwest

Native American and Chicano/a Literature of the American Southwest

Author: Christina M. Hebebrand

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2004-08-02

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1135933464

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This book studies Native American and Chicano/a writers of the American Southwest as a coherent cultural group with common features and distinct efforts to deal with and to resist the dominant Euro-American culture.