"This collection, which features an introduction and thirteen critical essays, is the first volume to focus on Scott's work rather than her intriguing yet troubled life and initiates a long-needed examination of Scott's innovations in fiction, memoir, and other genres. The various essays take diverse critical approaches to Scott's canon, including her best-known works - Escapade and The Wave - and explore her views on topics such as women, politics, religion, art and the South."--BOOK JACKET.
In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Elsie Dunn - later to be known as Evelyn Scott - turned her back on the genteel Southern world she was born into and ran off to Brazil with a married Tulane University dean more than twice her age. Living in tropical exile under assumed names, the couple produced a son and endured a grueling series of hardships and failures that would provide Evelyn Scott with the raw material for a singular work of fictionalized autobiography. That work, published in 1923 amid expressions of mingled outrage and admiration from the critical establishment, was Escapade.
A portrait of a literary enigma and her generation focuses on her radicalism which extended to almost every strand of American intellectual life in the interwar years.
Born Elsie Dunn in 1893 Clarksville, Tennessee, Evelyn Scott lived a tumultuous life that took her to New York, Brazil, western Europe, and the Caribbean. She published twelve novels during her lifetime and was a notable literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s. Published in 1937 alongside her penultimate novel, Background in Tennessee is an autobiographical work devoted to Scott’s Tennessee birthplace, her family’s history, and her broad view of Southern history. Her wide-ranging exploration of the south interweaves Scott’s personal history with discussions of colonial settlement of the region, local leadership of Clarksville and the larger Nashville area, and race relations. In this new edition, Bill Hardwig provides an analytical introduction that guides the reader through Scott’s intricate and winding exploration of early twentieth-century Tennessee and her own past. He notes at once Scott’s ambivalence toward her native South and yet the nostalgia with which she recounts personal memories. Complicated yet critical to a full understanding of Evelyn Scott and her literary legacy, this edition of Background in Tennessee makes available an important voice in Tennessee’s literary history for a new generation.
Poetry. The Collected Poems of Evelyn Scott continues an ongoing National Poetry Foundation project to bring into print the work of poets who in their judgment deserve critical reconsideration. Born in 1893 and beginning her writing career in the late 1910s, Evelyn Scott belonged to a generation that radically and permanently transformed the role of women poets within American culture. This volume reprints, for the first time since their original publication, two books of poetry that Scott published in her lifetime, Precipitations (1920) and The Winter Alone (1930), as well as The Gravestones Wept, a collection of poetry that Scott wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. These previously unpublished poems reveal Scott's work to have ripened into a new lucidity and authority. Reviving traditional poetic forms to new purpose, she addressed the traumas of modernity with a sometimes startling prescience. Includes biographical introduction by Caroline Maun and preface by Burton Hatlen.
Scott-King's Modern Europe is a satire on post-1945 totalitarianism. The story sets out in particular Waugh’s attitudes towards communism in the Balkans and is plainly also an attack on the drabness of the continent following the Second World War.